… And here’s the Last Chapter of the Black Book of Barad-dûr.
Read & Enjoy:
VIII. ‘Founded upon a mighty mountain-throne’
To build up this gothic wedding cake I had to construct an endless series of separate components, ranging from the ‘huge’ horns of the topmost pinnacle to the tiny battlements that crown the shooting-towers. It isn’t the size, though, that’s decisive for the amount of labour involved: it’s the number of particles of a certain component that has to be worked on and worked up. It took less than an hour and a half to construct the bridge above, cutting strips, spikes and all. However, between the first glance at the screen to study the bridge and the instalment of the very last spike, more than six hours went by…
Texturing and painting took another ten minutes, to make the miniature look like a bridge over troubled earth.
The fortress was put against a plate of MDF; a line that represented the ridge of the mountain spur was drawn onto the board. As the walls of Barad-dûr are rising from a chasm, I had to establish the ground level: it’s the horizontal, dotted line beneath the crest.
A floor plan was cut out from another plate of MDF. The idea was to have the lava river running at ground zero, with the adjacent rocks gradually sloping up against the walls. The positions of the two front towers and the pillars of the bridge had to be measured accurately from the main gate.
Between the bastions I cleared some space for the towers to stand on the floor plate. Once they were in position I would add more rockeries in the foreground.
Thus far I had been careful to keep the three main bodies of the fortress apart. There were so many projections on each of them that any sudden movement was likely going to knock off a spike, a battlement or a pinnacle. The less of the tower there was to reckon with, the better. At this stage, however, I had no choice but to glue the middle section onto the lower defences in order to complete the “mighty mountain-throne” whereupon Barad-dûr is seated. On both sides of the model, sheet piling was installed, together with two ‘surface’-tablets.
‘Behind it there hung a vast shadow, ominous as a thundercloud, the veils of Barad-dûr that was reared far away upon a long spur of the Ashen Mountains thrust down from the North’.
(from: The Return of the King, page 293)
Lastly, the bridge and the towers were glued in place. Small quantities of foam were carefully sprayed to cover the open ground.
Years ago, when I made my ‘Playalong-toy’-model of Mount Doom, I had poured red and yellow paint into the cracks of the volcano. From the start of the Barad-dûr II project I had had the intention to use the same ‘technique’ on the lava stream that circles the fortress. Now, with the miniature nearly finished and not wanting to spend extra money on tubes of acrylic paint, I decided to use my spray cans once more. I cut out the contours of the lava stream from a newspaper and sprayed the paper streamer with yellow, orange and red paint before gluing it onto the MDF. Next, a small amount of GW Modelling Sand was sprayed with black paint and mixed with some diluted wood glue. This stuff was spread evenly over the paper and then left to dry. As a result, I got these nice congestions of cooled down rock on the seething surface of the lava.
“Building miniatures is like taking a math exam:
If you do the equations correctly, you’ll get a hundred percent.
Get them wrong and you’ll fail”.
Richard Taylor, in Sibley’s ‘The Making of the Movie Trilogy’, page 67.
IX. ‘Between smoking chasms’
The Gorgoroth surface was broken into pieces and then put together again like a jig-saw puzzle to create the cracks of the ‘tormented earth’.
Next, Sauron’s Road and the lava channel were installed, both making up the MSR (Mordor Supply Route) that runs from the Sammath Naur to Barad-dûr.
Polyurethane cliffs were added.
It is told in “The Downfall of Númenor” that Sauron was envious of the splendour of the Lords of the West and that he was astounded when he first looked upon their lands (‘The Silmarillion’, pages 321, 326). This makes it plausible that Sauron took pains to ‘embellish’ the hot spots of his dark realm with triumphal arches, horns, spires and the like. Both in the ‘Shire-Baggins!’-scene and that of the ‘Union of the two towers’ there are glimpses of these two monumental structures that signpost the end of the MSR.
The Fellowship comes marching in
It is only when you realize that all these tiny dots of light that are moving towards the bridgehead are actually torches, carried by many thousands of Orcs, that you get an understanding of the colossal dimensions of these structures (for an incoming Orc, it must have been as if he was beholding la Grande Arche de Paris and the Gateway Arch of St. Louis at a glance). Nevertheless, these Megastructures must have paled into insignificance beside the bulk of the fortress behind it.
Needless to say it took several hours to think out a construction plan for these arches and less than thirty minutes to get them actually built.
I ended up right back where I started. Some last-minute improvements were applied to the twin horns: to mimic the metal plating against the outward faces, small vertical strips of cardboard were added. For a moment I feared that they would wreck the wicked shape of the tower but rather the opposite happened: somehow they gave a harsher look to the pinnacle without becoming too showy themselves.
X. ‘His cruelty, his malice’
“It is a gorgeous set to shoot, because you really can’t light it wrong. Wherever you put light, it gives you wonderful shadows!”
(Alex Funke, Weta’s Visual Effects Director of Photography, in: “The Appendices”, Part 4)
Principal photography – if I may use this professional definition for taking my petty snaps – usually takes two or three days. My camera isn’t state of the art, nor is the editing software that I use. But I have learned a trick or two to manipulate the atmosphere of the pictures. Basically, it’s a Stone Age version of what is called ‘digital grading’ by the Visual Effects wizards of Weta: the modification of the original quality and colour range of a shot. In essence it comes down to the next five operations:
1) Suck away a lot of the blue and some of the red to get rid of all cheerfulness;
2) add a little more green for a spooky aura;
3) bring down the ‘brightness’-slide to increase the amount of gloom & doom;
4) bring up the ‘contrast’-slide to get a harsher lighting;
5) bring down the ‘Saturation’-slide for an ashen, metallic look.
Of course, all the sliding needs to be done with caution and discretion. But with luck you catch the dreadful mood that weights down heavily upon the Land of Shadow.
In the end, I did shoot a total of hundred-and-eighty-one pictures of the tower. Six of them passed Selection.
The Bugler at the Gates of Doom
According to John Howe, who did the original design work on Barad-dûr, the tower rose up to three thousand feet: that’s over 914m. At Weta Workshop in Miramar, Richard Taylor and his team built a model at 1 : 166 scale which ultimately measured 27feet / 8.22m. They had to make it in sections because otherwise it wouldn’t fit in their construction stage…
Now if I had built my tower in agreement with the Games Workshop minis, I would have met similar problems. The Aragorn mini of the Mines of Moria-box stands a proud 3cm high; Tolkien however tells us that the actual height of this hero is six foot six, i.e. 1.98m. Comparatively, any model of the Dark Tower at GW scale should rise up to 45½feet or 13.85m.
From bottom to top, my Tower measures 4 foot 4 / 1.33m. The Gorgoroth-surface makes a 33’’ x 29’’ square (0.85cm x 0.73cm). The twin horn-shape is computed roughly by the mathematical equation of y = 0.44x2. The Boromir mini in the picture should have been exactly ten times smaller to play a serious role in this part of Middle-earth.
According to myth, the Miniature Technicians at Weta usually got two weeks to complete a model. Undoubtedly Peter Jackson allowed them some extra time to construct the twenty-seven feet high model of Barad-dûr. Compared to their ‘Gothic cathedral’ (in the words of John Howe), mine is but a poor countryside chapel. Still, it took me nearly three months to conjure this well-shaped encumbrance…
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie…
Im Morloth hain echant
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just too wonderfull for words 
But please feel free to use all the information you can extract from this WIP and from the articles at my own scenery-site. Also, don’t hesitate to ask questions about specific construction problems. You’re welcome!
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