Location: Lake-Town

This is a microscale interpretation of Lake-Town, as seen in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Lake-Town (or Esgaroth) is a "floating" settlement in the Long Lake, built upon pillars sunk deep into the lakebed. It is built entirely of wood, which makes it an easy target for the dragon Smaug when he emerges from the Lonely Mountain. This model sees Lake-Town before Smaug's attack, as the happy and thriving trade center witnessed by Bilbo and the rest of Thorin's party before they continue on to the Lonely Mountain.

This was my first attempt at a microscale build, and it was very challenging! I used a VFX breakdown featurette from Weta FX (available on their website) to see the overall layout of Lake-Town. The town is very large, and for the sake of time, I removed some large chunks from the original film design to create a more compact version. Even with the reductions, the final model has more than 1300 parts!