Paul Cato NZ artist - and LOTR

It was a delight to find this website of a first-rate artist, Paul Cato, working from his studio in scenic Queenstown, South Island. [ Oops. I wrongly had thought and written that Paul had come to NZ from the UK.  He set me straight. Red face, Will.]

Take a look:

http://www.paulcato.com/artists-bio.html

Read his account of being in the first two of the three Lord of the Rings movies from the JRR Tolkien epic yarn. The films' outdoor scenes were shot in several NZ locations, some of them right at Paul Cato's doorstep.

What's more, he was hired as a 'big body double'. Why? He is six feet eight and a half inches in height! (I won't bother converting to centimetres.) It's TALL. You'll recall that the hobbits in the tale are meant to be about three feet tall. The human star-actors were NOT that size, and one of many tricks to make them seem small was to film them next to oversized doubles who dressed as the normal-height humans in the story. This works for shots where the audience isn't looking at the normal-height human actor's face.

But Paul tells his own story:
http://www.paulcato.com/artists-bio.html