Battle of the Pelannor Fields

A 'collaboration within a collaboration', as part of the Journey of the Fellowship, Mark Kelso and Chris Phipson joined up to make a massive Minas Tirith, along with Tyler, Shannon Ocean and George Kemper who helped assemble and rebuild portions at the convention, and Lee Jones who brought much of the army. Be sure to go to Mark's page to see lots of WIP pictures as well.

War beacons

More from the Journey of the Fellowship. We never actually see these up close in the book, aside from Gandalf's statement that the beacons of Gondor are alight, calling for aid. War is kindled., but Tyler Halliwell (Wow! Have you been keeping count of his contributions to this group build?) shows us some. Okay, quick movie rant - I hated hated hated the scene of Pippin climbing up to light the beacons. Peter Jackson totally screwed up Denethor's character. He may not have had much hope, but he was trying to defend Gondor, up until mistakenly thought he saw the fleet from Umbar in the palantir as Faramir lay stricken. Grr. That scene in the movie showing the beacons lighting from mountaintop to mountaintop is certainly stunning, though. I suppose that pretty much sums up my thoughts on Peter Jackson - pretty much everything was visually spot on, but he screwed up the script in pretty important ways.

The Road to Isengard

Further along the Journey of the Fellowship, we find ourselves at Chris Phipson's Isengard.

Next poster revealed

It's LEGO Legolas.

Helm's Deep

Continuing the Journey of the Fellowship, Tyler Halliwell (again!) made a great battle of Helm's Deep.

The King of the Golden Hall

Next up in the Journey of the Fellowship collaboration, after the company is broken, the three hunters meet up with Gandalf and go to Meduseld, here by Dennis Price.

A Journey in the Dark

More of the Journey of the Fellowship, I previously blogged Dave Kaleta's great Rivendell, so let's follow the nine walkers to Lee Jones' amazing Moria.

Flight to the Ford

Continuing along the Journey of the Fellowship, Tyler Halliwell also made the Flight to the Ford.

At the sign of the Prancing Pony

Continuing on with the Journey of the Fellowship group build, Frodo and friends come to Leda Kat's Bree.

BrickWorld 2011

Last summer in Chicago, a group of builders got together to make a huge Journey of the Fellowship display. The journey begins with Tyler Halliwell's Bag End (hmm, it doesn't seem to be on his personal MOCpage.

What will be the next poster?

We've seen a couple of teaser images for the upcoming Tolkien theme, and as others have pointed out, these are basically LEGO versions of some of the Peter Jackson movie posters:



This, of course, raises the question of what will be the next poster. These seem pretty obvious candidates. BTW, was there a movie poster for any of the three movies that focused just on Sam? I can't find any, which is, IMO, a pretty good indicator that Jackson largely missed Tolkien's point. Okay, I'll save a movie rant for another day.



If they break away from the pattern of character close-ups, these are some others that I'd love to see in LEGO. Of course the third one would answer the question I asked before about how they will do the Ring.



I've shared this image before, but this is a good time to describe it in detail. Back in 2004 there was a movie poster contest on Lugnet. Here was my entry. There were several movie posters that were collages of images, and LEGO could do something like I did here. BTW, in case you're wondering, the faint image of the Ring in my poster is the top of a LEGO key, faded out in Photoshop.



One last, that would be fun and old school:

Aragorn

It looks like LEGO is going to be periodically releasing these movie posters to build excitement about the upcoming line.

How will they make the Ring?

In this thread on Classic-Castle we've been speculating a bit on this. Athos noted that the announcement poster looked "more like Lord of the Bracelets." There are various possibilities for existing LEGO elements that could stand in for the ring, like a gold 1x1 round plate, the new version with a hole, the new 1x1 round tile (perhaps printed), or the Clickets ring. These could all be clipped onto a minifig hand, or even (somewhat) grasped.



As noted above, though, those are huge. On the other hand, a truly fig-scaled Ring would be unmanageably small. Of course, the Ring spends most of the Lord of the Rings on a chain around Frodo's neck, so perhaps it might simply be a printed detail on Frodo's torso, like these examples of the amulet worn by the KK2 Guardian, or Yoda's little flute. There's also an existing 1x2 printed tile that would work perfectly as the Ring on a chain.



Anyway, that's all just speculation. What are your thoughts?

Edit- Some additional thoughts that came up in that discussion thread. There is a Harry Potter torso where Hermione is wearing the time turner. Also, Captain Jack's compass was suggested as a comparison of a small important object for minifigs to handle, and there LEGO used a printed 1x1 tile. Two-face's coin is another great comparison.

Rivendell

Last year people came together at BrickWorld to make a "Journey of the Fellowship" display. I'll try and get all of those posted, here. Let's start with a look at Dave Kaleta's great Rivendell.





Quick note - I'm using the tag for Fellowship here rather than Hobbit. Yes, this location first shows up in the Hobbit, but the description there is really sparse. Plus this particular setup does have figures there from Fellowship, though I've focused more on the location shots than the figs in them.

Figures

Here's another blast from the past. Several years ago, Saber Scorpion (aka Justin Stebbins) made a number of Lord of the Rings creations, primarily custom minifigs. I think my favorite of the bunch is his clever Gollum (I took the easy route and just used Dobby). He's got a ton, but I'll show his Gandalf and Frodo, his Gimli, and his interesting take on Sauron.

Speak, friend, and enter

Last June Julien Andries made this great rendition of the Doors of Durin. I love how the interplay between gaps in the bricks and transparent elements implies the inscription.

Brick Tales

In my last post I alluded to my LEGO illustrated Lord of the Rings, so let's go into that a little more. When I emerged from my Dark Age my first thing was telling stories in LEGO form. After a Robin Hood story and another short castle story, my roommate suggested I take a stab at my favorite book, the Lord of the Rings. Over time I did about 30 chapters worth. Maybe someday I'll go back and finish this, but I've got other things on my plate now. Anyway, I'll try and do one of these a week here, so that will take most of a year.

The first chapter I did was At the Sign of the Prancing Pony. I want to emphasize how much I am not proud of the LEGO building here, so don't take this as a sign of things to come, hopefully. If I ever were to complete the whole book, I'd probably go back and redo some of my earliest stuff. So, with all that caveat, here is the Prancing Pony (exterior and interior):



BTW, note how I started this project before we had "stubbies", or short legs, so I used headlight bricks for my hobbits.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all. On December 25, of Third Age 3018, the company of the Ring set out from Rivendell at dusk. Here's how I illustrated this scene.

Lord of the Brick

If you like Tolkien and LEGO, you should also be reading Lord of the Brick. Will (who also runs Brick Heroes and HothBricks) started this blog a month or so ago in response to the growing rumors of the recently announced Tolkien theme.

Hobbit trailer

I'm sure if you read this blog you've already seen this, but the Hobbit trailer came out today. I have to say I'm pretty excited to see this. Some other time I'll give my extended thoughts on the Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. The thumbnail sketch is that I loved the look almost everywhere, but was upset by the MANY places Jackson sacrificed important thematic elements from the book for the sake of adding another action sequence. Anyway, this trailer certainly looks amazing. We get a few clues as to the content of the movie. For instance, it seems that we will see the gathering of the White Council that Gandalf left Bilbo and the dwarves to go join. Probably we'll see a little bit of the attack on Dol Guldur, which is a cool little addition. Plus there are other ways they will tie this in with the Lord of the Rings movies. For instance, instead of Rivendell just being a jolly place to stop for a meal and a chat (while singing tra-la-la-lally), it will be the much deeper location we see in the later book, with an allusion to the whole story of Isildur (we see Bilbo checking out the shards of Narsil). I loved the instrumentation of the dwarves' song from the unexpected party (though why!?!? did they edit Tolkien's words?). Anyway, I can't wait for the next year to go by.