When I first met the now Sir Peter Jackson at the launch of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, its Middle-earth feel seemed to be so authentic I asked him if he'd ever been to Birmingham to see Moseley Bog for himself.

His answer then was "No".

And, sadly, that's still the same today - as I'd love to give him a personal tour.

But to see The Hobbit is to feel to capture the natural world's spirit of JRR Tolkien's novels, as if Jackson had grown up in Moseley himself.

Like any director his ambition then, and now, was to make a film that can be enjoyed by people who haven't necessarily read the books.

"The Hobbit is a story of a journey, a quest that takes the characters over a year to travel 'there and back again'," says Jackson.

"In a sense, making these movies has almost been like walking step-by-step, stride-by-stride with our company on their own quest.

"I feel very fortunate that, as a filmmaker, I have access to both tried and true film techniques as well as technology that is still evolving to even greater heights.

"I always want to have the audience immersed in the films I make, so they actually feel like they're going on this adventure into Middle-earth with me."

Jackson himself admits that Tolkien's original novel was "a ripping yarn that moves from event to event, and really doesn't stop".

But he still felt he could justify wringing another trilogy out of it by using more than 125 pages of appendices from The Lord of the Rings.

"The Hobbit was almost a lifetime's work for Tolkien," says Jackson.

"A lot of the ideas he had for fleshing out the story - the environment and the politics of the time - are all there in the appendices of the final volume of The Lord of the Rings.

"What became clear to us is that the story has the ability to expand yet still be The Hobbit that everybody knows and loves.

"So that's what we did, using his notes very much as our blueprint.

"I found it fascinating that something with a relatively innocent beginning ultimately becomes an epic unto itself.

"The Hobbit has a breathless pace because Tolkien was writing it as a story for his children and for the children of the world.

"Nonetheless, it has elements of greed and madness, of an innocent who is changed forever, and of the gathering forces that will lead directly into the events in The Lord of the Rings. This is where it all starts."

Athough The Hobbit has a familiar look - and sound, thanks to Howard Shore returning to augment his original Oscar-winning score - there is also a key visual difference.

"A lot of the imagery of Middle-earth has become quite iconic," says Jackson.

"But for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, it was important that it felt like a more idyllic time.

"The darkness that will descend on this world is brewing but hasn't yet expanded, so we wanted to reflect that visually by making it feel a bit more gentle, and have a bit more of a storybook quality in the design and photography."

For the first time, Jackson used state-of-the-art digital cameras.

They recorded the action in 3D at 48 frames per second for release in High Frame Rate 3D (HFR 3D), as well as all the standard formats.

"We want The Hobbit films to be a visual experience that goes several steps beyond The Lord of the Rings," Jackson says.

"3D didn't really exist in mainstream cinema 10 years ago at the level it does now, and we've shot the movie at 48 fps, which makes it the first feature film to be shot using today's High Frame Rate technology."

Jackson's own Stone Street Studios in Miramar, New Zealand has nearly tripled in size and capabilities since The Lord of the Rings trilogy was being made in the converted paint factory.

Building the world of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey utilised the entire eight-acre site, encompassing six stages, including the two state-of-the-art stages built specifically for the new trilogy.

Because Middle-earth is a pre-industrial society, all of the props were designed to appear handmade and unique.

For the Bag End feast, and many other scenes that required face-to-face interaction and where the characters needed to be of a different size, Jackson used a pioneering camera technology called Slave Motion Control ('Slave MoCon').

This enabled him to simultaneously direct his actors on two sets at once in scenes which could then be merged together digitally into one scene.

"When we made The Lord of the Rings, I was absolutely sure it was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience," Jackson adds. "It was an amazing and very special time, but when it was over, none of us believed that we'd ever be venturing into Middle-earth again. However, the experience of making The Hobbit trilogy became equally special to all of us.

"So now I have had a once-in-a-lifetime experience twice in a lifetime!"

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will be followed by The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (December 13, 2013) and The Hobbit: There and Back Again (July 18, 2014) (future dates provisional).