Behind the scenes with LEGO Icons 10333 Barad-dûr designer

The designer of LEGO Icons 10333 The Lord of the Rings: Barad-dûr offers a behind-the-scenes look into what goes into making a set of this sheer scale.

In a recent roundtable with LEGO Fan Media, 10333 The Lord of the Rings: Barad-dûr’s designer, Antica Bracanov dug into the some of the trickier decisions that went into making the enormous build. As just the second modern, large-scale LEGO set based on The Lord of the Rings, we already know that the LEGO designers had a surprising amount of freedom when designing – but that didn’t make some of these tough calls any easier.

Let’s break 10333 Barad-dûr down

For a set as large as 10333 The Lord of the Rings: Barad-dûr, thought doesn’t just need to go into the final model and how it looks, but even into exactly how builders will put it together or how they will move it around when built.

“The model is huge,” noted Antica. “If you want to move it around, it’s easier if you can take it apart a little bit.”

Plus (and luckily for a build of this size) breaking up the build into sections makes for a more engaging experience too.

“We did every section of the model in a different way, which helps to make the model less repetitive because every section is unique,” she explains.

It all started with the eye

The Eye of Sauron makes a terrifying impression in the Lord of the Rings movies, despite having a relatively low screentime when compared to secondary villains like Saruman, for example. When it came to putting 10333 The Lord of the Rings: Barad-dûr together, the importance of the Eye is reflected in the design process.

“We started from top to bottom,” she explained. “The Eye is the most iconic part of the model, so that was the starting point. Most of the designers in my team worked on their iterations of the Eye and then we had to see which one works the best.

“Once we found the shape and the size that we followed, then we started to work on the rest. The Eye was the first thing that was made and then we started to work on the platform and the surroundings.”

The importance of colour in 10333 Barad-dûr

There’s always a worry with sets on a large scale that they turn into simple monoliths of colour. Look at some of the larger LEGO Star Wars ships that turn into slabs or triangles of light grey; 10333 The Lord of the Rings: Barad-dûr being a block of black bricks would have been an easy trap to fall into. Luckily, Antica and her team had a plan to tackle this from the initial stages of the design process.

“We decided very early on that we needed to add something to make the tower look more dynamic,” Antica remembered. “We first agreed that it would be fun to include a little bit of terrain so that we have a base that extends a little bit further away from the fortress itself.

“Then we thought, if you have a source of light and then everything that is close to that source of light is warm, they would have different hue than things that are further away. We applied the same principle here and it works really really well. You end up with this mountain that goes from being vibrant and warm to a lot colder as you come up.”

10333 The Lord of the Rings: Barad-dûr launches on June 1 for LEGO Insiders or June 4 widely for £399.99 / $459.99 / €459.99 and there’s a free 40693 The Lord of the Rings: Fell Beast gift-with-purchase available until June 7 or while stocks last.

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