The Montreal Gazette reports that the special effects wizards working on the third installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, encountered an unexpected problem when creating the climactic battle scene. Director Peter Jackson told his special effects department, “I want battles like nothing anyone has ever seen on screen. I want every soldier fighting for himself – you have to come up with something”. So a special program was created that would give the 200,000 digitized soldiers “distinctiveness and individuality”. Special effects designer Richard Taylor said that the battle scene was created with the computer getting all the CG actors to think for themselves. “Each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture – determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence – and there’s 200,000 of them doing that”.

The problem? “For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle. We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away”!