[MOC] Duel of the Fates : Obi-Wan vs Darth Maul

[DanSto]

For the 11-th TechLUG Star Wars contest devoted to the LightSaber Duel, I have choosen the final fight between Obi-Wan and Darth Maul at the end of the Phantom Menace.

This because I like particularly Darth Maul with his double lightsaber and his unusual and choregraphic way to fight

The reference scene I have tried to represent is the one where the two characters are fighting to death in front of the huge and deep well. Moreover, into this scene, the two fighters hold their lightsaber using only one hand whereas most of the time they use both hands which is more difficult to do with minifigs.

THE ROOM AND THE DEEP WELL

I have spent some time to build this scene including the deep well, the floor and the backward wall in order to keep everything into 12 studs times 12 studs as required by the contest : the final version contains something like 800 parts.

Rendering the deep well is not so easy because it is really deep

and I did not want to do a one meter high tube or a waterpool like one. Talking about water pool, this picture of the making of is interesting because it shows a lots of details not easy to get into the video and because it shows that only the deep well is virtual.

So, for the deep well, I decided to build a 8 studs high half-cylinder on top of a 3 studs high funnel in order to use a forced perspective effect.

The wall of the cylindric well is made with black 1x2 tiles with grille fixed on dark gray bricks in order to have a striped texture. Note that the well is slightly tilted relative to the square base to align the white vertical band with the door of the room.

The cylindric wall of the well :

The bottom of thr well is made of 3x3 plates without corner stacked verticaly and forming a half-circle fixed by circular briks in front and back by an elastic; the diameter of the circle is obtained by intercaling a 1x3 plates between two 3x3 plates.

The bottom of the well and the base :

The well and the floor are included into a 12x12x12 studs3 cube onto a 12x12x2 studs3 decorated base.

I have choosen to close the 3 other faces of the cube adding some functional elements like air or fluid tubes and some duct to render its bulk shape.

Backward face and one of the lateral face of the cube :

The floor is made of two decorated arches for the border of the well, of bricks and plates lying on top of the cube.

Finally, the backward wall is made with 2 panels 13 studs high slightly sloped back making nearly 45 degrees from one to the next.

The central panel is build by 2x4 dark grey tiles shifted in order to render the white bach lightning.

The left panel includes the source of the force field and a control panel fixed on a trapezoidal black plate.

The right panel is made with 3 columns of tiles slightly shifted vertically to follow the floor profile.

The 3 panels of the backward wall :

For the back side of the wall, I have indroduced some decorative element in order to not just have a black back.

The whole building splited

and built,

with an animated gif to turn around it.

.

Some pictures of the MOC in real bricks ;

THE CHARACTERS

When Obi-Wan enters the room to kill Darth Maul, his master Qui-Gon Jinn is dying on the floor and, because there was some room remaining, I decided to include him.

For Darth Maul and Qui-Gon Jinn, I have taken the minifigs of the Sith infiltrator set using old brown hair for the Jedi instead of the reddish one. For Obi-Wan, I used the minifig of the podracers set taking the hair of agent Charge corresponding more to the movie.

.

THE SCENE

Some pictures speak finally better than a long speech :

Close views of the duel

Obi-Wan is raging against Darth Maul but takes care of the Dark Side

Some other views :

Larger images can be found into my Flickr album : https://www.flickr.c...57646030400841/

Animated gifs showing the building of the different elements can be found into this brickshelf folder : http://www.brickshel...ry.cgi?f=546082

Thank you for having read (or not) this long presentation .

[BEAVeR]

Amazing vignette! Not being overly big, it's rather remarkable there are 800 pieces involved. That probably has everything to do with the insane amount of detail you went for with the well, the elaborate base and the angled walls in the back. That bit of forced perspective is really nice, and it is quite effective in that bird's eye view. All of those arms on the side are probably my favorite detail, although they don't quite hide the structure behind it.

It's a bit of a pity we loose the feeling of immensity of the building, but what can we expect from such a tiny vig (except if you would do it with microfigs )? Maybe instead of creating half a circle of the well, a smaller portion with a smaller degree of curvature would help. That would easily insinuate the well being way bigger, and you would also have some more room for the minifigs. But that's really the only thing that has a small chance of improving this creation. It is already amazing. From the posing of the figs (and the little tricks you used there), over the incredible SNOT work, to the incredible smoothness of not showing any seems around the well. Well done (pun intended)!

Maybe one last piece of advice would concern the photography. Most of the pictures are very good, but your main picture sadly is not that great, with the hard shadows. You could also experiment a bit with the color of the lights to emulate the feeling of the big hall better. Maybe it would also make it look a bit bigger. But all in all, this vignette is good enough to overcome those problems. It's simply amazing! Keep building these gems, both small (because they combine your awesome Architecture-expertise with the incredible SW-aesthetic) and big (because, who doesn't like big ?), and good luck in the contest!

[Mencot]

Awesome, nice to see a lot of time, thought and effort that has been put into this moc and also into the presentation .

Like the details, especially the ones put into the well. Surprised that all this fits on a 12 x 12 stud.

Great job and good luck.

[Rishab N]

Wow this is some great work and the attention to details is nice

[Brickdoctor]

It clearly shows that you've put a lot of thought into this. You've done a great job deciding which elements of the scene you needed to incorporate in order to make the setting clear in a limited amount of space, and you've wasted none of that space, filling it all with greebles and other details. At the same time, you haven't crammed too much into the MOC. This is how vignettes should be designed. Great work!

[markus1984]

I don`t lik EP I-III but you have captured this scene perfectly.

Great vignette an a lot of authentic details!

Absolut great work

markus

[DanSto]

Thank you, I appreciate .