The Rings of Power - Durin's Bane Concept Art

During my time on Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power tv series I was tasked with revisiting our ol' mate Durin's bane. The client had already explored some vastly different Balrog designs, but by the time it came to WetaFX they had decided it needed to at least rhyme if not end up fairly close to the original from the LOTR trilogy. With this in mind I still had some scope to pitch the no-wings and more humanoid forms. However, in the end the body plan ended up pretty close the original, albeit with more ethereal smoke-like wing extremities and sharper, elongated head.

One new aspect that ended up in the final design was the idea I had of the hardened, lava skin actually manifesting into plate armour, specifically a nod to gothic plate armour in terms of shape language. As Balrogs are elemental entities of great magical might, this seemed to fit and was an attempt at injecting a bit of layered majesty to the creature. How much of that comes across on screen I'm not sure but it was a blast nonetheless.

Getting to work on this design was a real honour and very much a homage to the exemplary original design by John Howe, Ben Wootten, Gino Acevedo and many others for the LOTR trilogy.