A Rivendell progress update by Daniel Falconer

Given what a beautiful and important featured location Rivendell is in the trilogy, it has always been a miniature collectible environment we've longed to create at Weta. Our miniatures team created Rivendell for the films, so there's no better place to do it than here, but in the past a licensing restriction had kept Elrond's home off the table for us as a collectible. With Weta's new The Lord of the Rings license, that restriction no longer applies, so Rivendell is up for grabs again and if the collectors' polls are anything to go by, our customers are as excited to see this one released as we are. Bring on Rivendell!

There are a few challenges presented by Elrond's Last Homely House. Firstly, it's insanely intricate, which demands a certain size in order for that detail to be done justice, but make it too big and it becomes more and more expensive. Make it too small and it becomes a question of whether it's even worth doing as all that detail becomes lost and indiscernible. The feedback from folks on the collecting forums seems to suggest that most collectors share our view that Rivendell is something special and that, given its iconic status and beauty on screen, the collectible deserves to be treated as something special too. Of any of the miniature environment releases, it could probably stand to be a little bigger than most and form a kind of centerpiece for a mini environment collection. With that in mind, and trying to strike a balance between detail, spread and affordability, we've settled on building it on the largest of our existing miniature environment bases, approximately four-hundred millimeters long by two-hundred and seventy wide, or roughly sixteen by ten and a half inches.

The next issue to deal with concerns geography. Rivendell is a very complex structure with towers, wings, terraces, paths and structures that wind and twist across a rugged, river-etched mountainside. The miniatures used in the production of the movies have been taken apart and reconstructed more than once in the course of filming, and the use of digital matt paintings complicates things a little further. Rivendell's layout, it seems, is not necessarily entirely consistent from scene to scene. Given Elven magic played a part in its founding, that is not surprising, nor inappropriate, but it poses a challenge for us as we seek to recreate it in earthly polystone! A certain degree of compromise has had to be found in order to replicate the Elven outpost so that it most closely matches the most iconic shots in the trilogy, but there's some ambiguity involved. We've had to reason that perhaps what we see over the shoulders of the Fellowship members in some shots represents some other parts of Imladris not discernible in the wide shots?