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The making of Barad-Dûr
Part one
© Lotrscenerybuilder 2009
The balcony and the secondary pinnacles were made from MDF and jazzed up with cocktail-prickers and small bits of cardboard. In the end, when being covered with structure paint and our famous multi-coloured black finish, all these different elements together would become a 'dark and brooding' entirety. Meanwhile, we checked the silhouette of the tower by blocking the light with the tube and studying its shady side.
This picture in particular made us very happy; it felt like the Dark Tower was already in the bag.
Our rejoicing was somewhat premature. For another Ring had to be made. Now we could have done with some modelling putty to sculpt these spikes. But after ages of scenery building we feel strongly attached to our own range of materials: wood, paper, sticks & filler. We made little 'noses' of cardboard which were glued onto a cardboard ring; a cocktail-stick acted as a 'spine' for each nose. To give each spike a curve, the sticks were carefully broken in the middle and slightly bent apart. Filler was used to perfect their shape.
We would encounter a score of construction puzzles in the weeks that followed, but none of them as tricky as this Master Ring!
There's a lot that these pictures don't show. For example, we had to remove an earlier version of this ring - already firmly glued to the tube - after concluding by hindsight that the position of the spikes differed from the movie pictures. We were however wrong-footed by a picture of Barad-dûr on page 60 in Sibley's "Making of the Trilogy", which shows these spikes in a more upright position and slightly further away from the tower (as far as we know there were at least two 'bigatures' or scale models built of the Dark Tower, apart from MacLachlan's earlier sculpture(s?); the one on page 60 figured in the Two Towers film poster, the (bigger) one on page 55 was used for the panning scenes in the first two movies).
The approach for the receding buttresses against the tower-tube was already invented years ago: we used small strips of MDF - with different widths and lengths - as a base for each column. After that, it became a matter of dressing up both these columns and the empty spaces between them.
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