"Once it takes hold of us it never lets go" and maybe never true a word was spoken by Gollum
and it is fantastic to once again create a Masters Collection piece that has this
narrative within the center of its story stitching together the ring bearer as a narrative thread
through our Masters Collection. I feel that we've created a extraordinary complex and unique piece
that tells a story of Sam and Frodo, Gollum fighting their way across the marshes,
Frodo falling through, Sam runs to the edge frantic searching and Gollum already is plunging
his hand through breaking the world between the real world above and the spectral world below.
Frodo finds himself captured in the grip of these specters that are writhing around him;
it is a dark moment in their journey. Daniel Falconer has brought his love of the films,
his love of Tolkien law, to the design of this extraordinary piece The Dead Marshes really
jumped out to me because it's a scene that quite remarkably we've never visited in 20 years of
making collectibles. The opportunity to create a collectible that had like an above and below
element to it where you've got two different worlds and a bit of a duality going on was
very appealing. I did an initial sketch waved it under Richard's nose and he was like oh wow we've
never done anything like this before yeah great and then we reassembled the dream team from our
last Masters Collection piece and had Brigitte Wuest and Gary Hunt come back to collaborate on
this one. I knew that she would do an incredible job on particularly the specters under the water
which has to have an ethereal weightless quality to it. We also then had Sean Bolton to do all the
fine detail work on the environment for us so they shared duties on the different elements in the
sculpture. Brigitte's quite a remarkable sculptor, what she does so well is engineer the statue so
that it has flow, so the characters actually move around each other and intersect and flow
through each other and their eye lines line up and there's drama and this connection between them.
You really rely on a sculptor who can see all that in their head but then also knows how to then
actually practically break it apart and build it and make it so it's actually going to work.
Brigitte even welded up her own armature for the statue which is pretty extraordinary. Once all the
sculpted elements were completed and then brought back together we checked that it was all making
sense, that it all fit together, and then they were then cast and moulded. Pretty much everything
we do is cut into a certain amount of parts to make them moldable. The complexity of this piece
the levels involved, we've got things like hair and tree branches that need to
be separated. I think we were both a little bit gobsmacked by the scale of it. We tend to keep the
parts to a minimum but this one talking somewhere from 80 to 100 different parts. A lighting rig was
designed to go in through the inside of it, then it was all handed over to the paint shop to do
their magic on. The primary painter on this was a gentleman called Sourisak who's been with Wētā
since Lord Of The Rings days, he helped paint all these wonderful props from the films.
It's always wonderful working with him because you know he just brings so much experience and
knowledge to the table. It was really important to us that we had the split between the spectral
world and then the physical world on top and we had a mandate from Richard to really try and
push the technical boundaries. He really wanted this one to be more. It's quite monochrome at
the top, the colors are very simple very realistic very dark, but the minute you fall below the water
line, you start to see that ghostly green, those blues, and adding the lighting in that really
shows the movement of the water as you go further and further down to a black base;
which is almost like falling fully into the abyss. When we're looking to do a Masters Collection
piece we're looking for an opportunity to make a collectible that has some special quality,
something that we would never normally be able to bring to a regular statue. I'm so happy and
excited and proud of what the whole team has done to pull it together because I think this is pretty
extraordinary. Masters Collection is the best of the best of anything we do and in this case it
is the best one we've done; it's set the stage. I really think it's a masterpiece and I'm very
proud to have worked on it. This is a collectible at its absolute most precious and something that
I feel incredibly proud of and something that I'm thrilled to be sharing with you.