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Thursday, October 25, 2012

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)

October 25th, 2012Top Story

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)

By Thorin Klosowski

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)Few people go through their whole life on the same salary. Things change—you get a new job, get married, divorced, or laid off—and when that happens you need to recalibrate your spending habits. Here's how to do it without throwing your life into turmoil.

We're all prone to developments in a financial situation, and dealing with them—both the positive and the negative changes—is as much about recognizing the change from a psychological standpoint as it is about adapting your budget. To help get changes to your personal finance under control, I spoke with author and financial expert Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and debt-repayment expert Rod Ebrahimi, CEO of ReadyForZero.

How to Adjust When Your Income Increases

Adjusting when you have more money is a nice "problem," but that doesn't mean it's easy. In fact, when people get a huge windfall of cash a common reaction is to overdo it and blow all that money. That's not to say you shouldn't spend more, but you should incorporate it into your life in a structured way.

Step 1: Adjust Your Outlook Without Blowing All Your New Cash

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)So you just got a huge raise, or came into a massive amount of cash. That's great, but don't start spending it yet. Ebrahimi recommends you pause for a moment, and make sure you're solidifying your future before you go off and buy a Jaguar:

Perhaps most importantly: don't adjust your lifestyle expectations upwards just because you now have a higher income. If you do, you'll risk falling victim to the hedonic treadmill and you'll miss out on a wonderful opportunity to solidify your financial security for the future.

That said, you can still be practical and spend your new money. In fact, it's almost a necessity. If you hold back, you might splurge in the future when you're not ready. Sethi explains:

A lot of experts will say, "Take every dollar you're earning now and put it in the bank." That's not practical. The hedonic treadmill is real, if you make more, it's okay to spend more. Make sure you're making your goals, but that's it. If you try to deny yourself as you make more, that's a recipe for blowing up. Take a percentage of what you make, put it into guilt-free spending, and enjoy it.

So, like most things in life, it's about balance. When you get that financial windfall, take the time to think about your financial future, but don't deny yourself the reward for your hard work. Photo by JD Hancock.

Step 2: Create an Emergency Fund

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)With extra cash in hand, it's easy to start plowing through old bills and debts, but one of the fundamentals of financial security is preparation for the future. Because of that, Ebrahimi recommends you create an emergency fund before spending money elsewhere:

First and foremost, you should create an emergency fund to cover at least three months of expenses, but six months is ideal. This means if you go without income for three to six months you can cover your costs. It should not be used except in case of job loss, health problems, car trouble, etc.

Your natural tendency is likely to start paying off bills right away, but Ebrahimi's point is that you can't ever know what your financial future is. When you prepare for the future first, you'll have the peace of mind to cover more expenses in the present. Photo by Tax Credits.

Step 3: Start Paying Off those Large, High Interest Debts Automatically

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)Sethi is a huge proponent of automating your finances so that you're automatically saving money, budgeting, and everything else. His system is incredibly simple, and works on a percentage basis. For instance, let's say you're putting 5% of your income towards paying off a credit card. With your old job, that might have been $100 a month, but when you get a raise, that's a bigger chunk. The nice part is that when you land a new job that makes more money, you simply keep this percentage system, and you're automatically dedicating more money to those debts.

But perhaps you've been putting off paying off a bunch of different loans. In this case, it's best to tackle the high interest loans first. Ebrahimi explains:

Pay off any debt you have, start with the highest interest first. This will ease your monthly finances in the long run (no more interest payments) and give you financial freedom so you won't have to make decisions in the future based on your need to continue paying your creditors.

If you're already automating your finances, you should be dedicating more to those higher interest payments as it is. If you're not, do so, and let the automation do its magic so you'll have more money in the long run. Photo by Ruben Schade.

How to Adjust When Your Income Goes Down

When your income drops—whether you get laid off, you take a job with less pay, or whatever else—it's easy to feel like you're stuck in a rut and you can't do anything about it. To break free from that feeling, you have to stay positive, slightly alter your financial outlook, and make sure you still dedicate money to decreasing debts.

Step 1: Adjust Your Outlook and Keep Your Chin Up

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)When you lose income, it's significantly harder to adjust to the change than it is when you gain income. But that doesn't mean it's not possible. When your income goes down, it's all about not acting rashly, and adjusting your outlook so that it coincides with your new financial situation. This all starts in your head. As Ebrahimi explains:

This process will be hard, and you'll need to adjust your mentality to a new standard of living (at least, temporarily). Staying positive and proactive will help a lot during this transition.

Change your habits in order to bring your spending in line with your new (lower) income. This may require new behaviors like preparing food at home instead of eating out, shopping at thrift stores or discount racks instead of buying the trendiest clothes, etc.

The preparing meals at home part is easy, and regardless of your kitchen skills a ton of meals are simple for everyone. As for shopping at thrift stores, it's all about knowing when and where to do it. If you hit up upscale neighbordhoods you'll find awesome things, and doing so in spring can net you some savings. If you have hangups about the whole process, it's well worth ditching them so you can save money.

As Sethi points out, the other major problem with losing a source of income is the social factor. Friends and family still want you to go out and have fun, even though you can't afford it. Sethi has a very simple solution though:

You have to come up with a phrase that's comfortable. People don't like to say, "I can't afford it," because it almost signifies a weakness on your part. One thing I talk about in my book is to come up with a plan, then blame the plan. So, "I'd love to go out, but my spending plan just doesn't allow it this month." That way, they can't blame you—you're shifting the blame to the plan.

Unfortunately, that's really all you can do to adjust your point of view, but you can also do a few things from a financial position to make the process easier. Photo by Memphis CVB.

Step 2: Streamline Your Budget and Cut Recurring Expenses

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)First things first, it's time to streamline your budget as much as possible. Part of that is tuning your brain to not want those same purchases you used to make, but it's also about getting rid of any recurring expenses you don't need. Ebrahimi has a few suggestions:

The first thing you should do is streamline your budget. Start by identifying expenses that can be reduced or cut out entirely, particularly ones that are large and recur every month. For example, try to get out from under a car lease or auto loan if you have enough cash to buy a cheap used car or start using public transportation.

But don't act rashly if you can afford not to. Instead, ease into the new lifestyle while acknowledging that it's a temporary change. Sethi explains why:

People tend to act in a really short term manner, and they'll cut back on everything. This, of course, totally ignores the psychology of how we behave. We are what's called cognitive misers. We have limited cognition and willpower. So, if you try to cut back on everything—from the 50 cent coffee all the way up to stopping payments on your mortgage—that's going to be a really big problem.

Look at your two biggest discretionary expenses—for young people it's usually eating out and drinking—and take those and say, "how can I cut these down?" For a lot of my readers this is a target of cutting it by 30% over six months. A lot of people would say "cut it all!" But that's like saying you're 200 pounds overweight, and you're only going to eat 800 calories a day. You know it's not going to last.

Part of this process is also about lowering your monthly bills. The good news? Lowering your bills usually doesn't take more than a phone call, and you can lower every single monthly bill with a little effort. Another huge recurring expense you can get rid of is cable television. Sign up for more shows online, or invest in a set top box that suits your needs.

Go through every recurring payment you have and cut where you can. Working in a place with free wi-fi now? Consider cutting your data plan on your phone back, or get a cheaper "dumb" phone and supercharge it with SMS. Look at every bill you have, and cut it wherever you can. You'll likely be surprised at how much you can save in a month. It's a good thing to do no matter where you find yourself on the income scale. Photo by Images Money.

Step 3: Automate Your Bills and Savings

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)Again, automation of your finances is key here. In fact, it's more useful to automate your finances when you're low on cash because it gives you a more accurate view of how much you have left after bills. This is a good thing, because as Sethi points out, none of are going to spend the time redoing our budgets anyway:

Every personal finance books starts with, "let's figure out where you're spending." Then people close the book, and put it back on the shelf. In truth, you can start automating, and then figure out where you're spending is going. It's a myth that you're going to one day sit and open up your bills and figure out where you money is going.

Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a grasp on where your money is going. Some personal finance services, like Mint make the process of figuring out where you're spending money incredibly easy.

And just because you're making less doesn't mean you can't still save money. Instead of worrying over the exactness of your budget, Sethi suggests you simply reallocate funds inside your automated system:

If the money goes down, it doesn't mean you take a cleaver and start cutting things out. It means you reallocate things in your system. There's great research in the psychological and personal finance literature that says if you automatically save your money or automatically invest your money, you will not miss it. I'm not saying you should put away $2,000 a month. But if you put away $20 a month you can tune that up to $50 or a $100 over time. The key is to automate the money before you ever see it.

In the end, it's working with what you have, using the exact same system you used when you had a better paying job. The payoff won't be the same, but it can offer the bit you need to stay above water.

Step 4: Reassess Your Bills and Belongings

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)Sometimes, no amount of mental backflipping and budgeting can cover what you need for the month. Thankfully, resellers exist, and Ebrahimi suggests you use them:

If necessary, you may want to sell some of your belongings (on eBay or Craigslist) to generate an emergency fund. You might be surprised how much money you can recoup from selling old books, clothes, jewelry, or appliances that you don't use anymore. If you own a home with an extra room you may want to consider using a service like AirBnB to rent out the room on the weekends.

Getting rid of your unused stuff online is a snap. If you need to, selling your stuff on Craigslist is easy, and eBay is all about nailing the ending times so you're marketing to the right people. Photo by Dan McKay.

Step 5: Increase Your Side Hustle

How to Change Your Spending Habits when Your Salary Goes Up (or Down)Finally, it's time to get yourself back on track to making a more money. Both Sethi and Ebrahimi suggest working on your side hustle and finding extra jobs. Why? Because as Sethi suggests, the main thing you need to do is "focus on earning more." It sounds simple, but it's an important mindset when you've lost a large portion of your income.

We've talked before about a few of the places to find quick work online. These include services like grabbing random odd jobs from Mechanical Turk, or taking surveys over at Lightspeed Consumer Panel. You can also make money in your spare time doing all types of random things. If you need a little extra cash and you have some extra time, it's completely possible to earn cash quickly with little effort.

If you have a skill that aligns with freelancing, you can also get started freelancing without quitting your job. Just make sure you have a good idea of what you should charge for your services.


Regardless of what type of financial change you're going through, it's necessary to recognize it as a change—potentially a big one—and act accordingly. No financial situation is permanent, but learning to take control of your finances regardless of whether you're making more or less ensures you'll be better off in the long run.

Title image remixed from United States government, ~bsp2232, and Ildar Sagdejev.

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The Weird, Weirder, and Weirder Still edition of The Slatest PM.

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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Your daily PM briefing from The Slatest (@slatest), your trusty news companion.

By Josh Voorhees (@JoshVoorhees)

TODAY WAS A WEIRD ONE: Just how weird? It brought us news of a "Frankenstorm" threatening New York City, a cop allegedly planning to kidnap women so he could slow-cook and eat them, and a live shark that fell from the sky in California. So, yeah, like we said, pretty weird. We'll get to all those down below, but first we'll begin today where we'll likely begin every afternoon between now and Nov. 6: the race for the White House.

STATE VISITS MATTER: Slate's John Dickerson: "In this final stretch, the size of crowds at rallies can reach into the tens of thousands. The candidate’s pitch is more urgent: What voters choose to do with their ballots will change the course of the nation. But beneath that vast sweeping feeling of history is an intense and focused game of gathering and sifting. To most of us, the attendees at a rally look like an undifferentiated blanket of people, but to those working the political ground game, it is a pixelated assortment of uncollected cellphone numbers, hands to work the phone banks, and sturdy legs to walk neighborhoods. In states with early voting, the people a candidate draws to a rally are fresh meat to be cajoled onto a bus and taken to a polling place."

SPEAKING OF EARLY VOTING: It appears to be giving the president the lead in the seemingly make-it-or-break-it battleground state of Ohio, where a new poll has him out in front by 5 points thanks to his 2-to-1 advantage when it comes to those who have already cast their ballots.

NATIONAL NUMBERS: Washington Post: "Republican Mitt Romney has edged ahead of President Obama in the new Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll, with the challenger winning 50 percent of likely voters for the first time in the campaign."

RAY OF HOPE FOR ROMNEY: Slate's Kara Brandeisky: "Now that the debates are behind us, some of the more lasting effects are clear. The debates changed voters’ minds about Mitt Romney, but not about President Obama. After the debates, 37 percent say they have a better opinion of Romney, while only 16 percent say they have a better opinion of Obama. ... Obama may have won two out of three debates, but Romney walked away with something more valuable—a new image."

RAY OF HOPE FOR OBAMA: Brandeisky again: "While other polls are fluctuating, Obama is still maintaining a steady lead in Nevada. Yesterday’s PPP poll showed Obama leading Romney 51-47—exactly the same as the PPP poll two weeks earlier. In fact, since the debates, Obama’s approval rating has only increased, from 49 percent to 52 percent. Now even a top adviser to Nevada governor Republican Brian Sandoval predicts that Romney will lose the state by 1-3 points. Without Nevada in the Republican column, the road to 270 electoral votes narrows for Romney."

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY POLLS? Buzzfeed's Ruby Cramer: "With less [than] two weeks left until the election, pollsters are churning out 20 state and national polls a day—all for attention. 'Politics is not a major source of income, but it is a major source of branding,' says Zogby."

HAPPY THURSDAY and welcome to The Slatest PM, where your afternoon host (@JoshVoorhees) is ready to get weird.

KIND OF WEIRD: The Associated Press: "An unusual nasty mix of a hurricane and a winter storm that forecasters are now calling 'Frankenstorm' is likely to affect most of the East Coast next week, focusing the worst weather around New York City and New Jersey. Government forecasters on Thursday increased the odds of a major weather mess, now saying there is a 90% chance that the East will get steady gale-force winds, heavy rain, flooding and maybe snow starting Sunday and stretching past Halloween on Wednesday. Meteorologists say it is likely to cause $1 billion in damages."

WEIRDER: The Associated Press: "A law enforcement official says a police officer's estranged wife alerted New York authorities about her husband, who is now suspected of plotting to kidnap and cook women." The New York Times gets a little more colorful: "The police officer referred to the woman as Victim-1, recording details like her date of birth, height, weight and bra size. He made note of certain materials, like chloroform and rope. And then the officer, Gilberto Valle, a six-year veteran of the New York Police Department, saved the document in his computer, entitling the file, 'Abducting and Cooking (Victim-1): A Blueprint.'"

WEIRDER STILL: The Capistrano Dispatch brings us news of a live, 2-foot-long leopard shark that apparently fell from the sky earlier this week and landed on a California golf course about 4 miles from the ocean. "Honestly, this is the weirdest thing that’s happened here," explained the golf course's manager before hazarding a guess on how it happened.

BACK TO REALITY—

The New York Times: "The Syrian Army announced on Thursday that it would cease military operations from Friday to Monday to mark the most important Muslim holiday of the year. The truce [is] likely to be severely tested on many fronts given the fractured nature of fighting across the country....  If the fighting does stop or even slow for the holiday, Id al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, it will be the first time since April that the two sides in the antigovernment uprising that began in March 2011 have at least said they would try to halt the violence."

Reuters: "A Libyan militant suspected by Egypt of involvement in last month's attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya has been killed during a raid by Egyptian security forces in Cairo, a security official said on Thursday. The Libyan was killed on Wednesday in a raid targeting him and other militants with suspected links to al Qaeda in Cairo's eastern district of Nasr City, the official said. Four Egyptian militants were detained in the operation, he added."

The Washington Post: "Russian authorities are dramatically escalating the pressure on the opposition that emerged on the streets last December, going so far as to abduct an asylum-seeker in Ukraine in order to force him to testify against others, human rights activists say. Russian officials deny the abduction. ... Leonid Razvozzhayev, the man who was allegedly abducted, is in prison, and Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of their socialist movement, is expected to join him there Friday, charged with inciting mass disorder."

SLATE QUICK HITS—

We'll see you back here tomorrow. But until then, tell your friends to subscribe here, or simply forward the newsletter on and let them make up their own minds.

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Massive Secrets of The Hobbit - Revealed!

October 25th, 2012Top Story

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!

By Lauren Davis

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!This past spring, we, along with several other members of the press, were invited to Wellington to visit the set of The Hobbit, and at long last, we can reveal some of what we saw and learned, including more details on how Peter Jackson is expanding J.R.R. Tolkien's original story, how Gandalf will spend his time away from the main party, the Dwarves' individual personalities and backstories, and just how all this Middle Earth craziness is being filmed. Many, many spoilers below.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!No cameras were permitted at Stone Street Studios and Weta during this particular set visit. Instead, we have sketches from my notebook and illustrations I made based on my sketches and notes. (Those of you who have read my critiques of other people's artwork get to enjoy my terrible sense of perspective.) Since the sketches were assembled hastily, you'll have to take everything here as a rough approximation of the actual visuals. (Thorin's sword, for example, may look slightly different from my illustration below.) But we've done our best to bring you a small taste of the visual experience of visiting the set.

So what is going on in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey? Again and again, we heard that The Hobbit films will maintain the somewhat lighter, adventure story tone that separates it from Lord of the Rings while fleshing out the connections between the two stories and adding a bit more individuality to the characters. And it's all being achieved with close attention to the details of concept design, costuming, makeup and prosthetics, prop creation and special effects. Here's what we learned about the first film in The Hobbit trilogy from the cast and crew:

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

The journey of The Hobbit starts, of course, with our titular Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, portrayed by Martin Freeman. Despite Jackson's expansion of The Hobbit story to connect it to Lord of the Rings, Bilbo's transformation from timid Hobbit into hero remains at the center of the films. And Gandalf is the one who gives him that first nudge. Jackson explains:

[Gandalf] just remembers this young Bilbo Baggins as a young child who was the one Hobbit that he sees that loves adventure likes danger, loves scary stories. That has a more outgoing spirit, and when he wants a hobbit to be a burglar on this adventure he returns to Hobbiton many years later and he finds Bilbo. He deliberately hunts down Bilbo, because that's the hobbit who he thinks would be the best one to pick for this. He's appalled and shocked to find at the end of eighteen years Bilbo's become stuffy, and ultra conservative, and not at all like the little boy that he remembers. So that's the beginning of their relationship really.

So Gandalf forces Bilbo onto this mission with the Dwarves, and throughout the films, the Hobbit will find himself confronted with people who have warring agendas. Bilbo doesn't have these same sorts of motivations, but he has somehow found himself on an adventure involving all these people and he has deal them. By handling these personalities and their distinct interests—and encountering a few especially dangerous foes—Bilbo will gradually grow into his heroic role, and that unlikely hero is what Jackson finds so appealing about Bilbo's story:

The Hobbits are always the greatest heroes 'cause they're us, they're the unlikely hero who is thrust into this incredible danger and they have no choice but to get the goodness within themselves and the strength within themselves and try to survive and get through it, so they're always the most interesting heroes. They're not flawed, they're just unlikely heroes. They're not the sort of person you would really think would be able to take on a dragon, but when you see them actually doing that, I find that sort of heroism in films really interesting. Legolas is just a hero. I don't identify myself with Legolas that much. Just go and let Orlando do his thing and it's great for the movie [Note: Not necessarily the first Hobbit movie]. It's good.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!

Freeman, for his part, says that he "wasn't steeped in" Tolkien during his life. But he wanted to make the part of Bilbo his own, rather than basing his performance on Ian Holm's older Bilbo in Lord of the Rings. Freeman says, however, that he did study Holm's performance closely for certain key points during filming of The Hobbit. (He wouldn't say where in the films those key points crop up.)

And will Bilbo be feeling the effects of the One Ring during the films? Tolkien wrote The Hobbit two decades before Lord of the Rings and hadn't yet fleshed out the Ring's backstory and nature. Jackson explains that the Ring won't be quite as dastardly in The Hobbit films as in Lord of the Rings:

The way that it's rationalized, and I think people in the Tolkien world have rationalized it as the ring doesn't really gain its power until Sauron comes back and actively starts to look for it, so it's asleep for a while and in the days of Frodo it's getting very agitated and it wants to find its way back to Sauron.

There will, however, be nods to the Ring's power. The first time Bilbo puts on the Ring, says Jackson, it will seem to be a mere magic ring, but he'll experience more of the Ring's effects each time he uses it. Martin says that the Ring will have a recognizable pull on Bilbo, but that pull will "take a different turn" than it does in Lord of the Rings. Freeman notes that even though the tone of The Hobbit is a bit lighter than Lord of the Rings:

But it doesn't mean the stakes aren't there. It definitely still has to matter that he is in possession of this thing. And I think a lot of the time, even he doesn't realize why he wants to hold onto it so much, but there is an unspoken hold that it has on him, an unconscious hold.

Jackson says that we'll see some of the Shadow World when Bilbo slips on the Ring, but it won't be so nightmarish. It's in its infancy, before attracting the Eye of Sauron.

Gandalf's Journey

Meanwhile, Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellan) will vanish and reappear throughout Bilbo's journey, but unlike in the novel, we will get to see where Gandalf disappears to. As we've noted before, this is no great surprise since Tolkien explained what Gandalf was doing during those missing moments in the appendix to Return of the King. When Gandalf leaves the Dwarves, we learn why he throwing his support behind Thorin's quest. (Tolkien explains the relationship between Thorin's quest and the White Council in that appendix.) While the adventure story sits at the core, McKellan explains, "There will be the politics of Middle Earth going on in the background as a support."

Not only do we zoom in on the relationship between Gandalf and Bilbo, but on the relationship between Gandalf and Thorin as well. Gandalf wants to keep an eye on all the Dwarves, but his feelings toward Thorin, whom McKellan describes as "a bit out of control and not easily managed," are especially strained. One of the films' tensions will be whether Thorin will do things Gandalf's way.

Richard Armitage, who plays Thorin, says that the Dwarves need Gandalf because he possesses Thror's map and key, but also that Gandalf "hoodwinked" Thorin into this quest, starting their relationship off on an antagonistic foot. While Thorin agrees to take on Bilbo as the party's thief, he's none too pleased about it, and, Armitage continues, would rather throw off the yoke of Gandalf's leadership:

I think Thorin is trying to prove that Gandalf isn't correct, and most of his assumption is that he's trying to usurp his leadership. When Gandalf isn't there, Thorin really becomes a leader, and when [Gandalf] turns up, [Thorin] has to be subservient, and it's not something that he likes at all.

McKellan says that Gandalf does lose his temper with Thorin at one point, but in other parts of the films, he gets to play the mischievous trickster from the book.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!

Meet the Dwarves

Jackson told us, "Bilbo is the soul of the story, but the dwarves and their wanting to reclaim their homeland is very much the heart of the story." In the original book, the Dwarves are fairly indistinguishable from one another, except for their leader Thorin Oakenshield. But in the films, each Dwarf has a distinct personality, a backstory, and a role in the group. They have different reasons for joining Thorin on his quest, and they have very different relationships with one another and with Bilbo.

The Dwarves' quest to repossess the Arkenstone and retake their ancestral home is expanded as well. Gold is still a concern for these Dwarves, but it's not necessarily their major concern. For some of the Dwarves in Thorin's party, the pain of being forced from Lonely Mountain is still fresh. But even the younger Dwarves have decided to come on what many believe is a fool's errand to reclaim the mountain. Armitage elaborates:

[T]his particular group of Dwarves, only thirteen of them have come out on this quest. Everyone else turned their backs and said, "No, no, no, leave it alone. Stay away from that mountain." So it really is about thirteen survivors that are going to attempt to do something which people have dissuaded other Dwarves from doing.

We'll also be seeing younger versions of Thorin and his warrior compatriot Dwalin, suggesting that we may see flashbacks to the Dwarves' exile from Erebor and/or the Battle of Azanulbizar in Moria.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!Richard Taylor, co-founder and co-director of Weta says that creating thirteen distinct looks for the thirteen main Dwarf characters was a challenge, "But a wonderful challenge all the same." Each Dwarf has a distinct silhouette, as well as small details that point to their station in life and their personal histories.

Jackson describes Thorin as "an anti-hero":

He's become so obsessed with what he believes to be the right thing that he crosses a boundary in way, with the dragon sickness and things.

Armitage is quick to point to Thorin's background; he is one of the few members of his party who have experienced the "holocaust" that was the Dwarven exile from Erebor. (Armitage says he used the bombing of Hiroshima as an inspiration for the devastation caused by Smaug.) He still carries with him the trauma of Smaug coming to Lonely Mountain—as well as the heavy responsibility of trying to reclaim his ancestral home:

Yeah, I think knowing that his father and his grandfather have been touched by this dragon sickness which doesn't necessarily affect all Dwarves, but some Dwarves are susceptible to it. It's this attraction to gold which becomes their downfall, has always been at the back of his mind. And I think the burden of taking his people back to their homeland, which is so massive, makes him a lonely figure, I think. Knowing that his grandfather failed, and his father failed, so if he doesn't do it, there's no other member of his line that will ever do this. So he will continue through history as the king that failed to achieve the potential for his people.

Thorin's greatest fear, says Armitage, is failure, "And there's many opportunities for him to fail on this quest." He sees Thorin as a primarily melancholic character, although he suspects gold might perk up the King in Exile.

Six-foot-two Armitage never saw himself playing a five-foot-two Dwarf, but after playing Thorin for so long, he understands that the Dwarves don't think of themselves as small. "They're compensating for the fact that they are a secret forbidden race that were nearly destroyed." And, though Thorin is supposed to be an old character—older even than Gandalf (in Armitage's words, perhaps meaning relatively as opposed to chronologically)—he felt Thorin come to life as a warrior:

I needed him to be heroic on the battlefield and somebody that still has a potential to rise to that state of brilliance on a battlefield, even though it's like— He's like a flame that's fluttering, and has nearly been extinguished, but it has the potential to re-ignite. It's like a dying flame when you first meet him, but he still has to be a flame.

Taylor says that Thorin presented the greatest design challenge, both in terms of of his prosthetics and his costume. The Weta team wanted to capture the character's nobility as well as his inner darkness and world weariness. Armitage's prosthetic forehead is extremely thin, according to Taylor, "probably less than point-
one of a millimeter thick on the eyebrows," ensuring that Armitage can convey a full range of emotions with his face.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!Five sets of brother and cousins from various families accompany Thorin on his quest. The actors were encouraged to bring their own ideas to the table to develop their own characters as individuals, but those familial ties are significant. Peter Hambleton, who plays Gloin (son of Groin, brother of Oin, father of Gimli), explains:

[T]here's all sorts of different textures of loyalty, affection, family feuds, family versus family, where our family is a bit suspicious of that gang over there [eyes Dori and Nori].

Mark Hadlow, who plays Dori, said that when trying to figure out his emotional response in a give scene, he found it especially helpful to think of whether a particular situation benefitted his clan or another. Still, the actors said that when the Dwarves are confronted by an outside threat, they put aside their differences and join together into a "rock-solid" team.

Regarding Gloin in particular, Talyor says that when the team was designing Gloin's look, they used Gimli as their jumping off point. We'll have to see if he and his son share similar personalities.

Nori (Jed Brophy), with his wild star-shaped hair and beard, was the most dramatic silhouette the designers created for the Dwarves. Taylor acknowledges that it's a pretty wild choice:

And this is where, in an effort to try and find unique and new designs, you walk that very fine knife edge. Some will argue, I have no doubt, that we fell off the knife edge. I'd like to think we're teetering right on it. Because you've got to be bold and you've got to be brave and you've got try these things.

Nori is the middle child in the family of Dori, Nori, and Ori (Adam Brown). Hadlow and Brophy describe their characters as "Kickass, killer dwarves with a penchant for stealing stuff." As the oldest child, Dori tends to boss his younger brothers around. Nori resents it, but Ori gets the worst of it; Dori mothers him, which Hadlow says, "leads him up the wrong path. It's terrible." He grins.

(To add insult to injury, Ori wears little purple ribbons his mother plaited into his hair for his first trip out into the big, bad world.)

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!Oin (John Callen) is the group's apothecary, hauling lotions and potions and tending to the sick, although Taylor also describes him as one of the group's "old battlers." Callen offers this tidbit of character building he developed with Hambleton:

So we thought Oin and Gloin— Gloin is the father of Gimli, and we decided that probably, I was assisting at the birth of Gimli, and he turned out the way he did because I dropped him on his head.

Bifur (William Kircher) has a somewhat more complicated (not to mention tragicomical) backstory. Poor Bif has a goblin axe buried in his skull, and since we're in a pre-surgical world, whoever was tending to him decided to leave it in there. Bifur is a toymaker and normally a gentle soul, but that axe has left him with two rather pronounced problems: First, he suffers from a sort of foreign language syndrome, and can speak only an ancient version of Dwarvish that no one else can understand. Two, he becomes at times extremely violent, forcing whomever is near him to wrench the axe until he becomes docile again. It's no great surprise that he's looking for the fellow who tried to chop his skull into firewood.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!Bombur (Stephen Hunter) is the brother of Bofur (Jimmy Nesbitt) and cousin of Bifur. The -ur Dwarves are peasant farmers. "[T]o us it still means quite a lot to go and take over the mountain," Hunter says, "but we're just going along for the ride." Bombur is quite naïve, and doesn't know what to expect on this journey, but don't underestimate him. He can use his beard—which is braided into an enormous loop—as a weapon. He throws it over his enemies' heads, pulls them into his massive girth, and strangles them. Otherwise, he mostly cooks. While other Dwarves carry heavy armor and weapons, Bombur carries a tiny bag and his trusty ladle.

Bombur is quite terrified of Dwalin (Graham McTavish), as well he should be. Dwalin is the veteran warrior, and he, like his brother Balin (Ken Stott) and Thorin, witnessed Smaug's arrival in Erebor. Dwalin realizes that this trip is going to be much more harrowing than the young Dwarves expect. He's also a particularly violent character.

Dwalin has taken up this quest in order to reclaim the homeland and restore the honor of his people. The tattoos on his head and arms are an illustrated history of the Dwarves, including their defeats at Erebor and Moria, a permanent reminder of all the Dwarves have lost. He grew up with Thorin and is staunchly loyal to his lord. His belief is that you must show undivided loyalty or else you're an enemy. It's no wonder that he believes everyone is an enemy until proven otherwise. When Bilbo shows up and Thorin is less than pleased to have him join their company, Dwalin shares his lord's displeasure. Bombur and Bilbo, on the other hand, get on quite well.

McTavish contributed an interesting bit of Dwalin lore. He recalled that Emily Brontë had two hounds named "Grasper" and "Keeper," and decided that they would make great names for Dwalin's twin axes. ("That he grasps your soul with one axe and keeps it with the other," adds McTavish.) He suggested it to Jackson, and now the names are inscribed on the axes in Elvish.

Everyone seemed to agree that Jimmy Nesbitt has the best singing voice. And yes, the Dwarves do sing the plate-throwing song. Much dinnerware was harmed in the making of this film.

What about Gollum?

We didn't get to hear much about Gollum, especially with Andy Serkis busily directing the second unit. (We got to watch as he studied a scene in one of the later films and offered feedback to the actors.) But Martin Freeman shared his experience working with Serkis during his first weeks on the films:

Well, the first week or two even, maybe, was the Gollum's cave scene for me. That was the first day on set, so I was working with Andy as Gollum, which in itself is interesting. Fascinating as a baptism of fire. But friendly fire, because he's so good, that character is so beloved, and he knows that character, obviously, as well as anybody knows anything. So you feel safe, and you feel like it's an interesting way of— In a way, I preferred a scene that was more like a ten-minute theater scene than if it had been this scene, or just a running scene, or exploding cars.

We look forward to seeing how Serkis handles Gollum's riddles.

Matt Aitken, visual effects superviser at Weta Digital, says that the digital crew has been revisiting how Gollum works "under the hood." While they haven't made tweaks to the character's physical appearance, Aitken says that his digital body will behave more naturally and realistically.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!

What to wear in Middle Earth

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!How do you figure out how Bilbo Baggins dresses? Peter Jackson figured, why not look at Tolkien himself? Bilbo's country gentleman attire, notably his jacket and his smoking pipe, have their origins in the author's own accoutrements. Additional costume designer Bob Buck explained how that thread extended out into a whole world of Hobbit wear. The Hobbits, he noted, are a simple, pastoral people, but one whose lives are marked by frequent celebrations, great food, and beautiful flowers. The costumes needed a simplicity, but one that fit with the Hobbits' decadent lifestyle.

The costume team decided to draw on 18th-century Sardinian folk dress for the Hobbit women, although the team wanted their wardrobe not to reflect a specific era but to help them build a fashion world. The boning in the torsos of the dresses, for example, let them mold the body shapes of Hobbit women. Gathered, puffy sleeves made the women seem rounder. These visual tricks made the actresses appear in proper proportion, even when they donned those giant Hobbit feet.

Also coming to Hobbiton: color. Buck says that this past version of Hobbiton will be more colorful than what we saw in Lord of the Rings:

And one of my theories about why we also are more colorful is because the Ring hadn't actually been in Hobbiton now. In The Lord of the Rings, the Ring had been there, and had been tucked away in an envelope, tucked away in a special chest or whatever. But the evil and the menace, and the bad magic that that emanated, I think sucked the life and the color out of Hobbiton.

Buck calls Hobbiton "a Sunday best sort of world." Different Hobbits have different types of outfits based on their status and occupation: farmers, shopkeepers, rich folk, but for Bilbo they wanted to stick to a "gentlemanly-ness" and "Tolkien-ness." But Bilbo's dapper clothes take a beating over the course of the films and they acquire all sorts of dirt and tears. The wardrobe team has six versions of Bilbo's adventuring outfit for various points in the film (as well as smaller copies of each for Freeman's scale double). Apparently, it does not go well for Bilbo's lovely jacket.

The Dwarves get a lot of leather. So much, in fact, that one member of the press asked Buck, "Is there any leather left in New Zealand?" Buck described the Dwarves as "blokey" and "almost like a biker gang in a way." Still, the costume department had to come up with looks that reflected their life and status. Kili (Aidan Turner) and Fili (Dean O'Gorman), as Thorin's nephews are of a noble line, while Balin is more of a lordly councilor and Dwalin a general. Gloin would be a high-ranking military officer and Oin the medical practitioner. Stepping down a caste, Dori, Nori, and Ori would be more of a merchant class.

The costumers also designed graphic motifs for the Dwarfs (I felt like some of them resembled mechanical Celtic knots), stamped them on leather, and created their own fabrics with the motifs in them. Every component of the outfits, every button, every buckle, is originally made for the films.

The tricky things about the Dwarves' outfits are the fit and the weight. All of the Dwarves wear some form of padding—even Kili has some artificial meat on the shoulders and thighs—and it sometimes behaves in unpredictable ways. Buck mentioned one outfit that made the big-tummied Bombur look like the Michelin Man. And the one complaint the actors playing the Dwarves had was the amount of gear they have to carry; after months on set, it can get pretty exhausting. Buck indicated that Thorin and Bombur probably have the heaviest outfits (Bombur's is mostly girth suit), at perhaps 89 pounds.

Incidentally, Bofur may have the best hat in all of media. Sorry, Jayne Cobb.

World Rebuilding

Production designer Dan Hennah said that he feels like the visual scale of The Hobbit is larger than that of Lord of the Rings in some ways:

You have to think of it a little bit as a road movie. They leave Hobbiton and they go to the Lonely Mountain, and they come back to Hobbiton, but we're never anywhere for very long. It's one of those continuous changing faces everywhere you go. And, of course, every part of it is a different culture, and so it's demarked into different propage and different costumes.

The Art Department's rule is, according to Hennah, "The concept art starts with Tolkien." When designing scenes for The Hobbit, the department would continuously return to Tolkien's own illustrations, and in some cases, they had Lord of the Rings designs to work with. The Hobbit will take us back to Rivendell, but it won't be quite the same Rivendell we saw before. Henneh notes that, when last we saw Rivendell, it was in the autumn of the Elven civilization. For The Hobbit, they're giving it a more uplifting, mid-summer feel, adding a bit more color and magic.

Dale is the largest set constructed for the film, and we'll be seeing Dale both pre-Smaug (which we don't get to see in the book) and post-Smaug. Pre-Smaug Dale will emphasize the city as an orchard city, with a fairgrounds feel, filled with fruit trees, grape vines, and raspberry bushes. But the team also identified it as an alpine city, with water flowing through it, giving it a somewhat Venetian feel. The teams wants to portray what day-to-day life was like in this version of Dale, right down to the fabrics people would wear on a Sunday afternoon.

In contrast to Dale and Rivendell, we'll also take a tour of the Goblin court in the Misty Mountains. Henneh describes it:

It is a trap in the cave in the Misty Mountains, of course, and then once you get inside the Misty Mountain, it's like if you can imagine big internal crevasses that are just basically run right through. They're not just little round caves. Huge, big diagonal rips in the mountain. And so in amongst that the goblins that have stolen, they're like scavengers, they steal and they find, so they've got all this timber and fabric and skins, and this little kid's tree house, but they just cluster all over this thing and right in the centre of it, on a little pinnacle, is the goblin king's throne. Which is made out of an old bedstead ripped in half and turned upside down, and he sits on the head of the bed.

The team had a lot of fun creating the Misty Mountains. Set decorator Ra Vincent describes art department members gleefully making goblin hats and Henneh added that he particularly appreciated the tarantula kebabs.

Turning Men into Dwarves

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!Dwarves have big foreheads, big noses, and ears that stick out for forever. Fortunately for the actors, great strides have been made in the area of prosthetics that let them spend less time in the makeup chair. Weta designs and makes the prosthetics, and then they're painted and applied by Tami Lane and the rest of the Stone Street prosthetic makeup team. During the filming of Lord of the Rings, John Rhys-Davies had to wear a certain type of silicone prosthetic that needed to be blended off with gelatin eye bags to complete his transformation into Gimli. He had to spend in the neighborhood of three and half hours in the chair, and because the gelatin quickly melted, the prosthetics required constant maintenance.

The new silicone flat gel, developed in the last five or six years, is encapsulated in a theatrical bald cap material that's much easier to paint and apply. And, according to Lane, "[I]t's virtually heat-proof, water-proof, fire-proof, hurricane-proof." Just in case you ever felt like setting a Dwarf on fire. How much easier is it? It takes just an hour to give Richard Armitage Thorin's face. Even Bombur, who has a chin prosthetic, cheek prosthetics, and a bald spot, takes an hour and three quarters to make up. Kili, who has only a nose prosthetic, gets off easiest with just 20-30 minutes of makeup. Even so, the prosthetics themselves require a lot of love and care. After a day of shooting, a prosthetic can't be reused, and each one needs to be hand-painted with each eyebrow hair hand-punched. That's a lot of detail work with tiny hairs.

There have been similar advances in Hobbit foot technology. In the Lord of the Rings days, the makeup team had to glue foam latex feet to their actors' feet. Now the studio has slip-on Hobbit feet—just add baby powder and food. Martin Freeman wears insoles with his feet and he can even manipulate the toes. When his feet are being shot from below, Freeman wears feet with natural-looking soles. When he's running or jumping, he wears feet with little spiky treads on the bottom for traction. Perhaps in the next iteration, they'll make them grime-repellant; the Hobbit foot passed around the room became a magnet for every particle of grit and stray strand of hair in the room.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!

In addition to their facial prosthetics (including fake ears that slip over their real ones), the Dwarves wear Dwarf-proportioned hands. The full hands aren't particularly practical for axe-wielding, but stunt hands don't have a full palm; instead they have a meshy layer over the palm that lets actors grip their weapons without pesky slippage. Thorin is the only Dwarf who gets full arms since he's sometimes filmed with his sleeves rolled up. Petite Lane slipped a disconcertingly realistic Thorin arm over her real one while we marveled at her suddenly wrong proportions.

An interesting aspect of the new Epic cameras led to a slight tweak in the prosthetic makeup. When you see one of the Dwarf actors in person, he looks slightly flushed in some places. It turns out that the Epic cameras recognize yellow more intensely than the human eye does, forcing the makeup team to pinkify their prosthetics in order to compensate.

Haste required many of the actors in The Lord of the Rings movies to wear synthetic wigs, but the wigs in The Hobbit are hair—though not necessarily human. The Dwarves have yak hair wigs and beards to achieve a coarser effect—all except the regal Thorin, whose wig is made from human hair.

The wigs are made by a wig maker in the UK, which can be pricy (a certain wig in the trilogy cost $5,000), but allows for multiple versions of custom designs. Each character has at least three sets of wigs—one each for the actor, stunt double, and scale double (who's the same height as the character). According to hair designer Peter King, the Dwarves have six wigs and eight beards; the extras are for filming in certain situations.

Striking the right balance with the prosthetics and hair could be tricky in the design stages. Each character would have to get in full costume, full hair and makeup, and get in front of the production team and then in front of a camera. Often, they found that what looked good on the page didn't work on camera, and they would got through five, six, seven of these "show and tells." King said Thorin was the most difficult character to nail down; they wanted to be certain that he was conveying a leader-like quality, and the decision to switch from yak hair to human came out of one of these "show-and-tells." Other characters came with their challenges, but Thorin went through the most hair and prosthetic changes. Lane added that they ended up simplifying the design in the end, making his nose smaller and his forehead less pronounced. But even before they got to the "show and tell" stage, there were often mind-boggling numbers of design iterations. McTavish said that 819 different illustrations were made of possible beards for Dwalin.

Filming 13 Dwarves, one Hobbit, and Ian McKellan

One thing you will notice as soon as you walk into Stone Street Studios is that there are massive green screens everywhere. You can take tours of the real-life places where Lord of the Rings was filmed, but The Hobbit is a largely indoor affair. Where Lord of the Rings was a masterpiece of forced perspective, Jackson opted to try something different this time around.

To film Bilbo, the Dwarves, Gandalf, and the other characters at their respective heights, The Hobbit employs slave motion capture technology, specifically SimulCam. For example, when Gandalf is talking to the Dwarves and Bilbo in Bag End, the Dwarves are over on the set, and Ian McKellan is on a sound stage standing in front of a green screen. The camera filming Ian McKellan is "enslaved" to the camera on the Bag End set so that both cameras are looking the same way relative to their positions. McKellan's performance would then be superimposed onto the Bag End footage.

McKellan, for the record, hated this. He would be alone on the green screen set talking to tennis balls on sticks set at the height of a Dwarf's eye line. He says he was so vehemently against the slave cam that Jackson ended up cutting down on the number of scenes that employed it.

Massive Secrets of The Hobbit — Revealed!

What is the deal with 48 frames per second?

The set visit took place just a few weeks after the first screening of Hobbit footage at 48 frames per second, and there was a lot of curiosity about why Jackson planned to release some versions of the film at such a high frame rate in 3D and what other folks working on the film thought about it. Most of the actors had no particular opinion on the frame rate and confessed to not really liking films in 3D.

When asked why he planned to release the film at 48 fps in 3D, Jackson's reply indicated that this is largely an experiment to see how people react to that format as an immersive viewing experience. After noting that camera resolutions are getting higher, projectors are getting brighter, and screens in some places are getting larger, Jackson asked, why not try moving beyond the old familiar frame rate?

And it's really a question of do you just say, "Okay, this is what we've been used to for the last seventy-five or eighty years, and that's what we're going to stick with." Or do you explore ways to actually harness this technology to give people a better experience, and we're also, as an industry, we're facing a situation where less young people, especially, are coming to see films anymore. It's too easy to watch them on your iPad. Too easy to stay at home and play games, and so I think anything that we can do to provide a more immersive and spectacular experience—Filmmakers have been doing it, sixty-five mil, 2001, Kubrick and David Lean, they shot in these huge big formats to try to make it sharp and clear and that was like the equivalent of five-K in the film stock days. Todd-AO was 30 frames a second, wasn't it, for Around the World in 80 Days. There's been people trying to push it, but of course the just effect for seven or eight decades projectors were pretty much locked into twenty-four frames per second. We had to get past the mechanical film age to be able to explore other things, but it will be interesting. I personally think 48 frames is great, but we'll just wait till everyone can just see a whole full length movie, graded and timed and we'll see what people think.

For everyone else, 48 fps has meant a lot more work. Peter King noted that the hair and makeup department had to learn what the new cameras see and adjust their designs accordingly. Dan Henneh explained that the increased depth of field forced the art department to include more detail in their designs; Ra Vincent added, "It's actually enriched the propage and the sets a whole lot more, I think, because we're quite often using real materials instead of prop making plastics and things." Simon Bright, another member of the Art Department, concurred, "Gone were the days where you could say, 'Aw, that's just background, we won't have to worry about that too much.'" Matt Aitken pointed out that 48 fps means there need to be twice as many frames of any animated sequence. There has been a lot of time invested in this experiment, but fortunately we only have to wait a few weeks longer to see how that experiment pans out.

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