LEGO Designer Mark Stafford explains the intricacies of finding the right scale for LEGO sets through the lens of his newest set, 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile.
Figuring out the perfect scale for a LEGO set is no easy task and Senior Model Designer Mark Stafford had to work through a limited piece catalogue to get the scale of 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile just right.
LEGO sets typically fall into one of four scales – mini, midi, minifigure or large. Usually, picking the right scale comes down to what type of set is being made. A set designed for play will almost always use minifigure scale, allowing figures to properly interact with the build. An 18+ display set will sometimes use minifigure scale but will often go up to large scale to better capture intricate details, while mini and midi scales are also commonly used in display sets of varying sizes.
But when it came to designing 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile, the LEGO design team didn’t have a specific scale in mind when the first sketch models were built. “To some extent, we were just trying to be like a Batman version of LEGO Speed Champions,” says Senior Model Designer Mark Stafford. “It’s making a car, a LEGO car, as the core offering of the set. And the car has to be as good as we can make it, as close to the original version as we can get it. That’s the call.”
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So with no particular scale predetermined for the model, initial sketch models — the early drafts of a set LEGO designers build to get a feel for what the set could look like — were free to conform to the needs of the Batmobile rather than the restraints of a certain scale. And Mark quickly realised that even though the Batman Forever version of the car had all sorts of unique elements, it would be the wheels that would define the scale of the model.
“The scale is kind of dictated by the wheels and the arches over the wheels,” Mark explains. “We didn’t have elements that were bigger than this that we could make the wheel arches with, so going to a larger scale wouldn’t really have worked. Even on the very first sketch model that was made for this car, built by Ed Lawrence, the scale was set by these arches, these wheels.”
The arch elements thus dictated that 76304 Batman Forever Batmobile, despite being a 12+ set, would be above minifigure scale. But they also necessitated that it be smaller than the likes of 76328 Batman: The Classic TV Series Batmobile and other large-scale sets, ultimately creating a special scale for this model. And it all ties back to the wheels.
“It’s the arch around the wheel,” Mark said. “We just don’t have anything that allows us to make that wheel arch any larger right now, the quarter circles are the four-by-four ones, allowing us to make a six-wide gap. That’s as big as we have, and it might be a gap in the system, but we would need to go bigger to make those arches smoother.
“It’s a weird thing. Sometimes, when you’re building with LEGO bricks, the bricks dictate the scale because there’s certain elements that mean this model is going to end up being at this size. Beyond the wheels, we have the ribs, too. If you come down in scale, they just disappear. And the only way to represent it would probably be a sticker on the side of bricks. I know it’s an odd sort of new scale of Batmobile, but it’s very much dictated by what’s possible with the bricks.”
One of the last pieces of the scale puzzle was then figuring out the windshield — a step that proved more challenging than expected. “We had to make a new element for the windscreen to be eight studs wide,” Mark explained.
Making new elements for sets is something LEGO designers try to avoid, as it eats up the allocated budget for a set and involves figuring out how the piece can be used in the broader LEGO System. But in the case of the Batmobile’s windscreen, it proved necessary to make a new piece that would fit into the unique scale of Batmobile defined by the wheels and ribs.
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