BRINGING THE LEGEND TO LIFE

The Making of the Argonath – page four

©  Lotrscenerybuilder 2008

In the end, every model is the sum of all parts. In case of the statue of Isildur, one can distinguish four main elements: head, left arm, body, right arm. Each of them can be considered as a singularity. Once scale, material and building techniques are fixed and the first panel is sawed, it becomes a matter of plodding on until you’re happy with the result. The more the finished elements are to your liking, the more frightening it becomes to start with the next one. Now initially we didn’t think much of this hasty sketch of Isildur’s body…

…and for a while we believed we were on the wrong track…

By the way, has it ever occurred to anybody that the styrofoam Isildur figure Mary MacLachlan is working on in the Appendices seems to be in need of a… bra? Or is it just us seeing b-(beep!)-s where there aren’t any? (Some practical joke maybe, to humour P.J. on his visits to the Weta workshop). This mystery somewhat blurred our professional view while moulding Isildur’s bosom…

… but before harm was done we gained firm footing again.

What you’re looking at is a truthful image of our own foot, with the hobbit-hair left out. We believe the customary name for this kind of footwear is “Jesus-Nikes”. Two strips of cardboard & a wooden sole, that’s all it needs.

Axe and right hand, it was all there in the pictures for us to copy.

The Hilt of the Blade that was Broken in the hand of Elendil.

Familiar techniques were employed to produce the sleeve of the right arm.

It is all about layers as you can see. The raised folds of the dress were cut to pieces, individually filed in shape and glued back together.

As a famous Carthaginian used to say: we love it when all parts come together… Entirely Headless Nick is posing proudly in front of some earlier scenery (you might recognize the residence of the King of the Dead on his right hand and the Stairs of Cirith Ungol on his left).

Assembling the finished elements can be a nervous and time-consuming activity. We’re not talking about fully designed parts that come from a sprue and fit seamless into each other…

Both arms and body of Isildur were modelled upon the images in the movie but until now, we hadn’t given much thought to a way to connect them. While the visible sides show a flowing, semi-natural reproduction of body parts in kingly garments, at the reverse side it’s all ordinary woodwork with clumsy ends that won’t easily bend to the circumstances. So, after all this artistic carving we had to do some less delicate fretwork at the dark side to make it all fit neatly.

And of course, all components had to be glued together in the exact position as shown in the movie. It took some hard thinking to make things look allright. Although Isildur’s helmet catches the eye more easily and might even evoke the admiration of the spectator, getting his right upper arm in shape demanded a comparable amount of creativity and skill. Luckily there’s filler to mask any awkward seams.

We’d done the sculpting of Isildur’s face while it was attached to a manageable strip of MDF. Now time had come to transplant the face from the strip to the almost finished body. We installed a ‘spine-peg’ to define the silhouette of the back. Thus we were able to finish the statue’s west-side and fix the right position for the head. Since Isildur’s back would be almost entirely covered by rocks, there was no need for great workmanship here.

As for the hauberk hood, we took some pieces of cardboard and bent them into the right shape (not an extraordinary feat of modelling, this one. We certainly could have used some Green Stuff here).