Yearly Archives: 2014

Lego plus Pulp Fiction equals awesome

I really don’t care whether movie critics consider Pulp Fiction to be one of the defining movies of the New-noir genre, whether it is a prime example of post-modernist film or whether it is empty-headed camp.

Pulp FIction

I think it was a hugely entertaining movie and this black-and-white mosaic of Jules and Vincent by Joris Blok is awesome. Full stop.

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Pay your tithes at the Bank of the Prophet

About a year ago, we featured a beautifully rendered LEGO Songbird from Bioshock Infinite by the talented Imagine Rigney. At BrickWorld last month, he exhibited a complete scene that recreates the entrance to the Financial District in the game.

Bank of the Prophet Full View

Imagine has included a rail system and various enemies for a full-scale battle, including Booker using Shock Jockey on a Handyman and some Founders.

Shock Jockey!

Columbia looks hauntingly gorgeous at night.

Bank of the Prophet Night Full View

Check out Imagine’s full photoset on Flickr to see more detailed photos of this massive build.

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Gotta catch ’em all with Combee

Like many guys born in the seventies and eighties, as a child, I spent many Saturday mornings watching cartoons on TV. I used to watch classics such as Transformers, M.A.S.K. and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors and build them out of LEGO. By the time Pokémon came along, I had lost interest in cartoons (other than Ren & Stimpy). Pokémon struck me as an obvious ploy to get children to spend their pocket money on what were obviously rubbish toys. Gotta catch ’em all, right? Not at all like the cartoons I used to watch.

Ash & Pikachu

I have, of course, come to realise that my favourite cartoons were as much about selling toys as Pokémon, but I still think that much of the TV series was a bit rubbish. That said, I also realise that, to many people, Ash & Pikachu are no less iconic than Scott Tracker and T-Bob, or (dare I say it) Bumblebee and Spike Witwicky. This and the quality of the models, means that I cannot overlook these great figures built by Combee!. Pikachu looks particularly cute.

Thanks to Niels Huyzer, who suggested this to me several weeks ago.

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Robot Can Build a LEGO Tower All the Way to Space!

Well, OK, just in theory. But this amazing NXT-controlled LEGO robot by Hknssn can build its own tower, and since the robot rides up the tower with each new piece it places, there’s theoretically no limit to how high it can build as long as it continues to be fed pieces.

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Friday Night Fights – Concept Art Ships

Welcome back fight fans, to Sin City Nevada for another round of Friday Night Fights. Tonight we dive into the world of Concept Art turned into LEGO. A lot of builders will use reference photos of cars and buildings to build their models. There’s a small subset of sci-fi builders which will use Concept Art as a basis of their creations. Let’s go to the tale of the tape.

In the white corner, we have Alexander (Malydilnar) who used this concept as inspiration for his Talon fighter:
Talon

In the blue corner, we have Jake who used used this concept as inspiration for his ship:
Glaive

As usual, constant reader, you are tasked with deciding, by way of comment, which ship is a cooler Concept Art turned LEGO. On the last edition of Friday Night Fights, Exo Suits, Ilya won a close 3-2 with his BAR Exo Suit. Tune in next week for another action packed edition of Friday Night Fights!

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Invasion of the clone brands

The Adult Swim channel on YouTube posted a hilarious stop-motion video depicting what would happen if clone brands invaded the Lego world with a plot inspired by World War Z.

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LEGO Steampunk Star Wars AT-ST

Behold the mighty Steampunk chicken walker, a foe to be reckoned with – unless you’re a monocled Ewok in a top hat, I’m guessing. Crossing Star Wars with Steampunk is nothing new, but I like Don Solo’s take on this classic vehicle, which being spindly and awkward, was perfectly primed for an old-fashioned makeover. Don built this in anticipation of FBTB’s LEGO Star Wars Steam Wars Returns contest, which is currently ongoing.

His Imperial Majesty's All Terrain Steam Transport

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Cooking up a storm

The Italian LEGO Users Group (ItLUG) recently held a kitchen-themed building contest, the prize for which was (appropriately) a copy of the Parisian Restaurant set. The contest had various rules, including one that each entry had to occupy no more than a 16 x 16 stud footprint.

Although not the ultimate winner, my personal favorite was Bye Bye Potato by Devid VII:

But victory went to Fabio Maiorana for this darkly humorous (and possibly rule-bending!) vignette entitled L’Apparenza Inganna (“Appearances Can Be Deceptive”):

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And the Walls Came Tumblin’ Down

The traditional LEGO vignette (on a 6×6 or 8×8 base) seems to be less in vogue these days than it was a few years ago, but this slightly larger vignette by Matthew Oh has such a great sense of motion that it instantly caught my eye. Depicting the Biblical miraculous destruction of the ancient walled city of Jericho, this vignette makes excellent use of implied motion to draw the viewer in.

Fall of Jericho

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Fishing the turbulent waters of the East Sea

It does seem like we’re obsessed with spacecraft today, so here’s a very different kind of vessel. Hoang Dang built this Vietnamese fishing boat to raise awareness of the complex political situation happening today in what westerners typically call the “East China Sea” (even the name of the geographic area is fraught with tension, thus my quotation marks). For a change, I’ll stay out of the politics, but Hoang’s LEGO model certainly deserves plenty of attention.

Hoang has built his model at the scale of the classic Technic figure, which gives him a bit more room to play with shapes and details than if he’d built it at the typical minifig scale. He captures the curves of the hull wonderfully, and details like the sea star on the Vietnamese flag, nets, fish in barrels, and lights all add realism. But my favorite aspect of this model is the color — it’s not often you see a bright blue boat built from LEGO!

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The Princess Bride recreated in LEGO by team of builders at Brickworld

While VirtuaLUG is currently the undisputed king of collabs at Brickworld, that may change soon with this rising crop of young builders…

At Brickworld 2014, the so called “ChiLUG+ImpLUG+Friends” group unveiled their Princess Bride Collaborative build, based on the classic 1987 movie. This group consisted of: Philip Bernston, Daniel Church, Casey McCoy , Ben M Merrill, Lee Muzzy, Matthew Oh, Max Pointner, Ian Spacek, and Paul Vermeesch.

Mawwiage

As always our friends at Beyond the Brick have a great video highlight of this layout:

Follow the tale of Buttercup →

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A lamp alight in the darkness of space

I’m apparently in quite a spacey mood today, since this is the second microscale space LEGO model that caught my eye. This one is by Shannon Sproule, a med-station orbiting Saturn named Nightingale. The gold is a beautiful touch.

Med-Station Nightingale

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