Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1480624
The long history of dwarves informed much the show's design. We took clues from the words of the Song of Durin, even incorporating those phrases into carvings within the rock. Another tricky thing about dwarves is that their god, Aulë, is married to the goddess of nature, Yavanna. To honor her, they rarely cut down trees, so very little of their craft is made with wood, using it only when its tensile strength and flexibility cannot be reproduced with another material. So, making furniture posed a unique challenge. Megan had a brilliant idea: while much furniture could be made from metal, some could be petrified wood, a beautiful material. Throughout all our designs, we found similar ways to subtly weave in the Legendarium. Logistically, one of the trickiest things about dwarves was their scale. The actors playing them are averaged-sized folk, but dwarves are generally seventy-five percent the size of humans. This was approached in several ways. First, everything in their world was scaled up in bulk or shape, so that made the actors look smaller. Their chairs are tall or broad, their goblets chunky. Then the production had to work out how to put them in scenes with characters who are ostensibly taller than them. This meant we had to figure out how to adjust for the scale of their world. There would be "Story Scale" sets, where things were the correct size for a human, elf or orc, and "Large Scale" sets, where things were scaled appropriately to the smaller races of dwarves and Harfoots. The trick was when the two worlds had to be shown in the same shot. We didn't want to force the actors to work separately in green screen environments, nor did we have the resources or B A. ELROND AND CELEBRIMBOR APPROACH THE GATES OF KHAZAD-DÛM (DWARVES) ILLUSTRATION BY GERHARD MOZSI. CINEMA 4D, 3D COAT AND PHOTOSHOP OVER PHOTO OF NZ LOCATION. B. MODEL VIEWS OF SET PIECES FOR THE EXT. GATES OF KHAZAD-DÛM, BACKLOT BUILD (DWARVES). DONE IN RHINO BY SAM COTTERELL. C. INT. DURIN'S HOME, KHAZA-DUM (DWARVES)- A COMPOSITE SHOT BLENDING TWO SCALES. THE FG AND THE DEEP BG ARE "LARGE SCALE" WHILE ELROND AND HIS TABLE, CHAIR AND PROPS WERE SHOT IN "STORY SCALE." A C