Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1480624
Harfoots are even smaller in story scale than dwarves, so the production had similar issues to resolve with their props and dressing. With several Illustrators, we explored fun images of their camp. Matt Cornelius, the prop master, set out to create those props, using every trick in the book from handcraftsmanship to 3D printing to produce an army's worth of props for all these cultures. I particularly admired how he and his team worked out what each culture would eat. The Harfoots had overscale roots, leaves, nuts and berries. (Props made ten thousand large-scale gummy blackberries for Harfoot children to eat in the berry patch.) There were the elegant, mostly vegetarian and very artistic meals for elves, and robust (overscale) root vegetables and meat shanks for dwarves. The very simple and spare fare of the Southlanders contrasted with the elegant and rich foods of the Númenóreans, including custom-made fish from the Sundering Seas. The Harfoots also had one of the three language systems created for this series. They are not a literate people, but the story required some way to record what they needed to know to safely travel. I asked Daniel Reeve, who has been doing calligraphy and maps for the Tolkien world over several decades, to come up with a system of simple pictographs that we could annotate into the "star book" Sadoc carries, and to also carve on the wood supports of the Harfoot tents, telling the story of each family, and to A C D B