Figuring out how to squeeze all of the massive White City into 11377 The Lord of the Rings: Minas Tirith required a fellowship of LEGO designers.
11377 The Lord of the Rings: Minas Tirith is officially one of the biggest LEGO sets of all time, with a whopping 8,278 pieces required to recreate the fabled White City of Gondor. When it came to deciding just how big the LEGO Icons model should be and how much detail to pack into the build, the designers behind the latest Middle-earth creation had to combine their talents in order to complete such an epic quest.
A new Secrets of our Sets video has revealed just what went into bringing 11377 The Lord of the Rings: Minas Tirith to life and how fitting seven levels into the huge LEGO Icons release was more challenging than it may have initially seemed.
“When you look at the city, it’s circular and you have seven layers,” explained Senior Designer Francois Zapf. “The idea was to flatten a little bit of the entire model, so it’s not entirely circular. And we also decided to cut it in the middle behind the Tower of Ecthelion.”
“We would mix the scale,” added Senior Master Model Designer Mike Psiaki, “but not just kind of exterior/interior like on Barad-dûr, but actually mix scales throughout the whole model.”
That idea of scale was prevalent throughout the entire 11377 The Lord of the Rings: Minas Tirith design process, requiring a specific way of thinking in order to crack the right look for the LEGO Icons build.
“You have all those tiny houses all around that gives away the scale,” said Francois. “How can you find some clever ways to still have the minifigures interacting with the build without compromising too much on the shape, on the iconic features of the city?
“When you are standing in front of a tall building, what is in front of you appears bigger. And when you look up to the building, everything else is kind of smaller. And that’s exactly what we tried to recreate with this thing. So, you can see the different sections of Minas Tirith getting smaller and smaller.”
Despite some initial work having already been done on 11377 The Lord of the Rings: Minas Tirith, the two LEGO Icons designers decided it was best to to pool their resources to figure out how much of the original movie model they’d be able to fit into the final set.
“Francois had a concept model that looked great,” said Mike, “and by our kind of like, you know, finger-in-the-air guess, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of doable in this amount of time.’ And then the more that he worked on it, we realised quite quickly, this is too much for one person to do on their own. So, we decided to split the model into levels. I took the top four levels and Francois took the two bottom levels.
“It’s a city of seven levels and when I joined the project, Francois had worked out six of the levels. We were going back and forth like, ‘Does it really need to have seven levels? Does anyone know that? Can you even see it?’ And everyone we talked to was like, ‘You don’t need to put in seven levels. It’s fine.’
"We’ve already made this model way bigger than we were supposed to make it. If we go back now and say, ‘Hey guys, we’re going to make it bigger,’ we knew we couldn’t do that.”
Fitting that tricky seventh level into 11377 The Lord of the Rings: Minas Tirith was the final piece of the puzzle, but the LEGO Icons design team was eventually able to work out just where that section should be added.
“We had to find a way to sneak that extra level that we were missing into the model,” Francois elaborated. “Basically, we reduced the size of some walls, the lower section, trimmed off a couple of bricks at the top of the walls, trying to squish everything, and we managed to put the seventh layer in.”
11377 The Lord of the Rings: Minas Tirith can be purchased from the official online store in the UK and Europe right now, but is currently on back order in those territories. The LEGO Icons set is temporarily out of stock in the US though, so there’ll be a longer than usual wait for those in the region planning to pick up the Middle-earth model.
Support the work that Brick Fanatics does by purchasing your LEGO using our affiliate links. Thanks!
Comments
Be the first to comment!