Sir Richard Taylor: A Knight and a Designer

When someone is a knight and has five Academy Awards, they might be worth knowing about. Sir Richard Taylor is just that person, but chances are you have not heard of him until today. He is the designer and founder of Weta Workshop, which is perhaps one of the key reasons that The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit series are so awesome. Weta Workshop designed and built many of the props, costumes, make-up, and visual effects that make those movies so compelling.

One of the key innovations that Taylor and Weta Workshop have refined is the concept of the “bigature.” You have likely heard of “miniatures,” where small-scale models of cities or spaceships are used instead of computer graphics. A bigature is still a scaled model, but it’s much larger and allows for even more detail. Some bigatures can be many meters in height or size.  One of the most famous is the model of Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings. The movies still had computer graphics blended into certain shots, but the city itself is a bigature in many wide-angle views, and it looks amazing.

Figure 1: A scale model of Minas Tirith [1].

Although the movie magic Taylor helps create is also the work of countless people behind the scenes, it does often take a visionary and a leader to direct and focus the efforts of the full team into amazing results. Although Sir Richard Taylor is a knight for his contributions and services to the film industry, he’s also a designer at heart. He might not wield swords to fight dragons like in the storybooks, but he certainly knows how to design a prop sword that looks, feels, and acts like the real thing.

Figure 2: The cinematic rendering of Minas Tirith [2].

You don’t have to be a Knight to make a contribution as unique and wonderful as Sir Richard Taylor, but at a minimum, we should appreciate, more than just the directors and actors, the designers behind the scenes of these amazing movies.

REFERENCES

[1] Weta Workshop [@wetaworkshop]. Photograph of Sir Richard Taylor. Instagram, 27 May 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CsyXuarNhgB/.

[2] “Minas Tirith.” The Middle-earth Cinematic Universe Wiki, Fandom, https://middle-earthcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/Minas_Tirith.

To cite this article:
Salmon, John. “Sir Richard Taylor: A Knight and a Designer.” The BYU Design Review, 5 March 2026, https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/sir-richard-taylor-a-knight-and-a-designer.