BRINGING THE LEGEND TO LIFE

The Making of the Argonath – page two

©  Lotrscenerybuilder 2008

More cardboard was added to produce the decorations of the crown. The pictures on the Appendices-discs were a great help since the movie frames do not by a long way reveal all secrets of these statues.

When the helmet was finished, we switched to the face and helmet of Elendil – we just wanted to make sure that we could build both statues of the Argonath. But of course the face of Elendil was much easier to sculpt since his beard is covering much of his features…

… and his helmet was just less of the same.

Sadly, in a later stage, we had to redefine the stern image of this king of old.
“Not the beard! Not the beard!”

It’s their left hands, raised in a gesture of warning, which draws first attention when one looks upon the statues. We didn’t want to sculpt anatomical correct hands, we only wanted to make bits of MDF look like real hands. Now if you watch your own hand it is easy to see what gives it its characteristic shape: four fingers, more or less of the same length but connected at gradual ‘positions’ to the palm; they are bent slightly and the ring finger and little finger a bit more than the others; the thumb isn’t placed next to the forefinger, but halfway in front of it. Also, if you study the movie frames carefully you can see that both hands are not raised dead straight but a bit ‘on the slant’.

With these data at hand it wasn’t all too difficult to produce two near identical hands. The ‘wrist’ was used to glue the hand into the right position. Filler was used to mask the joints and to re-model small flaws.

The hands of both Isildur and Elendil, lying brotherly together in the hand after which they were modelled. Kingly hands all three of them, if we may say so.

Our next project was the making of a ‘front-axis’ that would cover the joint of both robe sleeves, the outward & inward one. This ‘axis’ would also determine the shape of the robe, as well as the height of the statue.

Matches helped to model the sleeve-ends of both the Isildur and the Elendil statue.

With the scale of the head and the hands fixed, we had to establish the total height of the Isildur-statue. This wasn’t lightly done as we didn’t want to end up with some knight of the rueful stature. Four slabs of MDF had to imitate the alternating front folds of the robe.

We used a file to shape the folds into a flowing S-curve. Now you know… how it’s done.