Lord of the Rings and LEGO - Part Two

If you dig deeply enough in my Brickshelf folder, you will eventually come up with a old subfolder entitled "Tolkien," which has not been updated since it was first established back in 2004 or so. It contains pretty much all the remaining visual evidence of an attempt back in high school of my brother and myself to make a LEGO home-video adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.



It was an ambitious project, the last in a fairly long line of rather badly made LEGO movies, that prior to delving into Tolkien plots, had been original stories. It should be emphasised that these were not stop-motion movies, but video-camera filmed scenes with no/limited movement and lots of talking. Dreadful as the end products were, however, they were a lot of fun to make, and probably taught us a fair bit about the craft of cinematography. It was also, apart from my Silmarillion project, the only serious attempt I made at portraying Middle-earth in LEGO (the battles and games mentioned in the previous post notwithstanding).

In the end, we finished 3 of a projected 7 installments--one for The Hobbit and each of the six "Books" of The Lord of the Rings. The picture above comes from The Return of the Shadow (as Book 1 of the published Fellowship of the Ring got titled. The astute observer will notice that the hobbit-hole is not lined with LEGO bricks, but is non-LEGO, and the dark "floor" is my smooth desktop. Nonetheless, considering my abysmal track record in those days of photographing LEGO, it's still a decent image, and catches the "feel" of Gandalf and Frodo discussing the Ring in Bag-End.



This picture is from Part II, which got to keep the book's title of The Fellowship of the Ring, and shows the Gates of Moria. Personally, I've always felt that this was one of the better sets created for those movies (hence why a picture was taken), though the biggest reason for its success is not that I was a talented builder, but that I successfully stickered the Gates to look like the image in the Book, which defines the scene.

Unfortunately, all footage of this last film was lost (and possibly its predecessor?), which so discouraged my brother and I (having put a few weeks of hard labour into it) that we never attempted the remaining four parts. Mind you, we were both getting older and less interested in such things... but never mind that. It's a far better story to say that, the footage being lost, the morale of the crew was broken and the project never finished.

Maybe someday...