Amazon's epic Lord of the Rings TV series may have just wrapped filming on its premier season, with post production now on-going until June next year, pre-production on the second season will begin on January 1 after shifting from the franchise's New Zealand home to the UK. The series may have some huge sets that have been purpose built in the country that Peter Jackson used as the backdrop for his ground-breaking Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, but these will be shipped to the UK for the new season as part of Amazon's expanding UK production footprint for a number of reasons, primarily revolving around the on-going uncertainty around Covid restrictions.

When Amazon green-lit the series, there was no way of the knowing the unprecedented situation that would cause the shutdown of practically every major production across the globe. For the Lord of The Rings production, the tough and tight restrictions imposed by New Zealand around travel in and out of the country meant that many of the mostly British cast had to remain in the country for the entire production, unable to see families during that time, and more importantly for Amazon their executives were prevented from performing set visits on what is one of their biggest, most high profile and astronomically costly projects. With the Delta variant of Covid now causing more movie release delays in certain parts of the world, New Zealand have announced that their stringent restrictions will stay in place well into 2022.

Rather than risk more disruption to the next round of filming, a move to the UK means that many of the series' stars can remain on home turf, while crew, who were mostly locally hired for Season 1, will be rehired in the UK.

An additional boost for the production is thought to be a freedom of movement around Europe similar to that of Game of Thrones, which mostly filmed in Ireland, but also moved around numerous countries including Spain, Iceland and Croatia. Having multiple filming options is obviously going to help when it comes to developing different environments on screen from the location of the shooting rather than having to recreate this with computer graphics or other excessively expensive technology - not that Amazon are scrimping in that department - but it also helps boost employment in numerous countries who have been financially suffering in the last eighteen months.

The Lord of The Rings series recently announced that the first season will premiere in September 2022, which is quite some way from the 2021 arrival that was originally planned, but like so many other productions, it was inevitable that there would be a substantial delay following the Covid shutdown, and with the series aiming to be one of the biggest and most extravagant productions ever made for the small screen, post production is going to be just as important as principle photography. With the hype around the series already building and over a year to go until its release, it is likely that the series is not only going to be the most spectacular TV production put on screens, but the audience figures are going to be pretty magical too.