LEGO Ideas 21370 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial has found its way to Earth — hear from the LEGO designers about some of the challenges in adapting E.T.’s unique design into LEGO bricks.
First created by LEGO Ideas fan designer Richard Lemeiter, 21370 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is soon to release as an official LEGO Ideas set after having earned 10,000 supporters on the fan-driven platform. As part of the process of becoming an official set, the original project is redesigned by the LEGO Ideas team to make sure each element of the build is up to the LEGO Group’s high standards.
Richard’s original design did well to capture the disturbing-but-cute look of E.T., but Model Designer David Guedes and Design Manager Jordan Scott were soon to find out that reimagining the model would come with almost as many challenges as E.T. faced trying to phone home.
“E.T. is kind of a potato with arms, right,” begins Model Designer David Guedes. “He doesn’t have a lot of posability as an alien. You could change his arms, but you’d have to rebuild a little bit for that, just to get a little bit of a different pose.”
“The most important pose for us was to have him be able to point,” adds Design Manager Jordan Scott. “He obviously needed to be able to look up and to the side, but he also needs to point his very long finger, and he does have very long arms in proportion to his body. So one of the bigger challenges is that they’re very thin. As soon as you start trying to brick build them, they get very bulky. One of the biggest challenges was definitely getting that organic look of a potato.”
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Part of E.T.’s potato-like look is his abundance of wrinkles, which proved to be one of the biggest challenges in creating the alien. What are essentially random and natural wrinkles on E.T. in the movie had to be carefully sculpted for the LEGO brick adaptation.
“One thing that the fan design did really well was a lot of stepping between bricks with half stud offsets, where it would go a plate up while going half a stud in or out,” explains David. “I kept that as much as I could. That really helped to get the wrinkles. The bows really help to make the wrinkles when stacked together. It did take a bit of trial and error, since it’s weird to try and sculpt something to look wrinkly.”
While the wrinkles translated relatively easily from the fan design, the overall scale of the model did not. The winning LEGO Ideas submission contained 1,500 more pieces than the final set. And the reason for the scaling down of the model was more than just ensuring a more affordable set.
“From the beginning we knew we’d probably have to scale it down,” says Jordan. “The fan model was very large, which is really impressive, but we wanted to scale it down to make it a bit more feasible in terms of posing.”
Posing comes down to the aforementioned freakishly long arms — E.T.’s most iconic pose is the point, and in order to properly have him recreate that moment in the film, the arms would have to be able to hold in a raised position.
“Those arms would be really heavy,” Jordan continues, referencing the original fan design. “We simply don’t have joints that would support that length of arm. We can support some things, but since they’re basically the length of his body, they become very heavy.”
The practical considerations with the arms kept E.T.’s scale rather consistent throughout the design process, not requiring any major overalls to the size of the sculpture.
“We had a really good idea of the size we wanted to make it,” David says. “It ended up becoming just a little bit bigger, so the eyes scaled properly. We didn’t want them to be too big or too small, and the rest of the body followed from that.”
“We always have a huge focus on the eyes for models like this,” says Jordan. “If you get it wrong, it’s very, very wrong. We experienced that with 21349 Tuxedo Cat, then applied those learnings to 21361 Gremlins: Gizmo. Then on this one we tried to have the same approach of making one eye that you can use for both. But that looked wrong because E.T.’s eyes aren’t perfectly round. They’re more oval shaped. So we made the decision to do a left and a right.
“We had a bunch of prototype stickers that we were applying to bricks and swapping around. Some of them had super subtle differences, like a curve being two or three degrees lower, but it has a big impact. They were a lot of work to get right.”
And in their efforts to get the design right, the designers were working to satisfy more than just themselves and the fans who would ultimately get the model — Steven Spielberg himself was involved in the process.
“Steven Spielberg is very proud and kind of protective of E.T.,” explains Jordan. “It’s basically his baby. So there was a lot of communication in that regard. But I don’t get to meet Steven Spielberg. I would love to, but no. It’s a case of having calls with people at Universal and sending approval documents that they want to put in front of Spielberg to get his opinions on them. It’s pretty incredible that we’ve had someone that prolific in the film industry talk about the model and give us input.”
To learn more about how David had to experiment with the LEGO System — and turn to the help of new elements — to get E.T.’s look just right, head here.
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