Source: Peter Jackson Facebook | Posted By: Dan Geer

Last week, those who purchased The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey on Blu-ray/DVD were given an access code to a live event over at over at TheHobbit.com, where fans could catch their first behind-the-scenes look at the next film in the trilogy, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The event lasted for about an hour, and gave us all sorts of goodies to salivate over, such as our first look at Evangiline Lily’s Elven character, Tauriel, Orlando Bloom’s reprisal of Legolas, and even a preview of a completed scene featuring Gandalf the Grey and Radaghast the Brown delving further into the mystery of the Morgul Blade we saw in An Unexpected Journey. The event also took us on a tour of director Peter Jackson’s post-production offices, where we were shown some pre-viz being worked on, as well as motion-capture.

Jackson also answered quite a few fan questions, including some submitted by Lord of the Rings veteran Billy Boyd, and even Comedy Central’s own Stephen Colbert, who made sure to humorously exhibit his knowledge of Middle Earth with a long-winded, heavily-detailed inquiry. These questions, along with another fan question about constructing the middle film in a trilogy, are featured in a condensed, six-minute version of the live event that Jackson posted on his Facebook page, along with a peek at new scenes being shot, as well as some great artwork showcasing the realm of Mirkwood. While it’s not nearly as great as seeing the hour-long version of the video, and doesn’t show the new scene with Gandalf and Radaghast, it’s a great preview of what fans experienced last week. Check it out below!

Thank you note from Peter Jackson:

Thanks to everyone who tuned into our Live Event last week. I’ve never done anything like that before, and I was pretty nervous. Hope it was ok.

If you saw it, it was a pretty accurate picture of what life is like at the moment. Jabez and I sit in that editing room all day, every day, editing the second Hobbit movie, and we actually start on the third next week! A lot of that movie was shot nearly a year ago, so I’m looking forward to seeing it come alive, shot by shot in the cutting room. It’s like assembling one of those complex 2000 piece jigsaw puzzles.

For us, this is really the being of 2013, so I look forward to posting a bunch more stuff as we work through the year.

I think that an edited version of the Live Event is being made available over at the official Hobbit site, and Warner Bros have kindly let me post a 6 min excerpt here, to give everyone who missed it a sense of what it was like.

Cheers,
Peter J

Head on over to TheHobbit.com and enter the access code included with your Blu-ray/DVD copy of the film to see the longer, albeit still edited version of the live event!