The Hobbiton Movie Set

Yes we did it! They have walking tours every 10-15 minutes every hour costing 79$ each. We were shoved into a bus with 20 or so other fellow movie nerds and shuffled around the set for about an hour and a half. All taking turns taking pictures in front of the infamous Bilbo Baggins residence. It's a relatively small area but the hilly landscape adds levels for the path to seem bigger than it is. Wow what an undertaking building this movie set this was. Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were both filmed here and it was really cool to see. The director did a lot of neat tricks to make the hobbits seem small relative to other humans rather than using CGI with a greenscreen. The director flew around and selected this landscape which happened to be owned by a farmer who got rich overnight for doing nothing. Then they called in the military to build roads and shut down the airspace in a 5 km radius so that there wouldn't be any planes mucking up the footage. The second time around they decided to film here the director and farmer made a deal to rebuild the set and run tours, netting 20,000$ a day we estimate.Read more