I’ve made no secret of my love for Jonathan Lopes’ urban landscapes and was a little sad to hear he’d destroyed his latest town. Luckily he’s back with a new project which promises to be very interesting: starting a new town in a sub-minifig scale. By my guess this is about half to 2/3rds the size of a regular train layout but so far seems to have most of the details I’ve always loved. I’m very excited.
Sometimes, you start building one thing and it ends up as something else.
I’ve been having great fun building micro for the last few months, and got out my bins of orange and medium-blue (yes, I sort some of my LEGO by color) because, well, they’re complementary and I hadn’t built anything with them yet.
I loved my tiny science vessel (right), but wanted to do something slightly bigger, in the same scale.
Instead, what came together was a futuristic submersible, which I’ve decided is an Underwater Autonomous Vehicle like ENDURANCE, designed to explore the icy depths of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. In honor of the composer-astronomer who discovered this moon (as well as the planet Uranus) and the explorer who discovered Antarctica, I’m calling it Herschel-Lazerev.
At this year’s Brickvention I once again had the pleasure to team up with the very talented Mike Pianta (scruffulous) for a town/train diorama. Like last year’s Ararat we went for a rural Australian town theme, and again set it in 1972 to maximise our building fun. This time we chose Elmore for its distinctive train station.
You can find many more pictures by some wonderful photographers at the convention in the layout’s flickr group.
While we’d learnt a lot from the previous year this one presented new challenges. Not least for me how to bring large buildings in my aeroplane luggage. And for Mike how to assemble large base segments without ever getting a chance to see them all together. Luckily we were able to overcome the challenges and I’m very happy with how it turned out. Apparently the TLG judges were too as we were honoured to be awarded Best in Show.
I’ve just returned from Melbourne where I attended my third (maybe fourth…) Brickvention. Each year this convention gets bigger and, more importantly, better. A huge thanks to the organisers for making it such a great event.
For those who could not attend here’s a selection of some of the great creations that were on display. Or of course you can find your own by wading through the tags or Brickvention group. And if you took photos please remember to add “Brickvention” and “2012” to your tags and submit it to the group.
With full stands and an incredible minifig selection, Jennie Sasson bent walls to capture the geometry and activity of a Quidditch tournament. Her use of 3D for the players gave the tournament a wonderful feeling of action.
The Canberra LUG brought along this wonderful rollercoaster using the old blue track. Watching it zip around the track was a pleasure. I know David Boddy has some great videos of the show too.
I have to admit I missed Travis Matheson’s ‘Nova’ ships at the actual event, but having spotted the pictures now I really regret it. Some excellent microscale love.And of course these are merely a few of the many great models and displays that the 10,000 audience members got to see. We’ve already seen Ryan’s rocket and I’ll blog Mike Pianta‘s and my creation later.
PS. Excuse the messy pictures. WordPress hates this sort of layout for some reason. And I hate taking too much space or boring you with excess words to fill space.
I’ve been enjoying halfbeak‘s LEGO creations for a while now, but it seems I hadn’t managed to blog any yet, so I’m glad he posted this strange little micro-ship. Halfbeak is also great at writing very tiny stories to go with his very tiny ships — backstories that don’t overwhelm the model and actually add something.
While we’re at it, he posted a great pair of “colonial ark” ships back in December. Click through for the excellent micro-story.
Shannon Sproule (Shannon Ocean) has a very odd interpretation of the Batman in 2025. It’s for the LUGNuts 51st Build Challenge: Batmobile 2025.
This spindly mech by Kahan Dare (aka tadashistate) brings a bold look and a bit of flair as it poses cheekily. Kahan also proves his style with a spot of lovely photography using a simple background that accentuates his model.
Our good friend Huw over at Brickset recently attended the UK Toy Fair in London. Huw writes, “Although photography was not allowed on the stand, there was nothing stopping photos being taken of the stand: the sides and, for that matter, from the balcony above. This picture was decorating the side of the stand and as you can see it shows the whole Fellowship of the Ring.”
Read all of Huw’s report about the LOTR sets over on Brickset, and be sure to check out the rest of his coverage.
Martin Latta’s (thire5) UCS scale ARC-170 starfighter is very easy on the eyes with its smooth sculpting on the nose, engines, and pretty much everywhere else.
Flickr user crises_crs portrays the new Collectible Minifig Series 6 Minotaur trying to put the mooves on a heifer in this beefed up vignette.
In this fourth installment of classic LEGO commercials by Advance, we have Black Monarch’s Castle, a journey through time and space and, lastly, an adventure in Egypt inspired by Indiana Jones.
LEGO System Black Monarch’s Castle – 1988
This was an extremely simple set-up — it was just the castle set depicted on the box transferred to a studio, just LEGO trees, a cardboard hill and a cardboard background. We made the background the same colour as the box to create the playful effect when the box appears. Notice the name of the play-theme 00:15 “LEGOLAND”, back then it was a LEGO category and now as you know its a world wide theme park.
LEGO SYSTEM Intergrator 1996
Still the most expensive commercial we’ve made at Advance, this was a huge project. The ad was inspired by LEGO Time Cruisers. We travel through the boxes into three different LEGO worlds but time stops in the ‘real’ world. When we return to the store, the cleaner hasn’t moved. Actually the cleaner also played the pirate in the striped top you see at 00:14. The casting for the pirates was hilarious, we had ten different guys show up with amazing costumes. We built the LEGO city in the desert at night and shot the next day, I slept in the truck that you see. The set almost blew away in a desert storm during that night.
LEGO SYSTEM Adventure 1998
Set in Egypt and heavily inspired by Indiana Jones. What looks like a huge set was built entirely in LEGO filmed with extreme close-up lenses. And the boy was shot on bluescreen. What’s interesting here is that in the boy’s room 00:26 we see lots of toys that aren’t LEGO – LEGO is almost taking a back seat and that would not happen today.
As OJ says over on The Living Brick, “The great thing about Japan and China using the same zodiacal chart but celebrating the New Year on different dates is that I get to do this twice!” Indeed.
Schneider Cheung celebrates the Year of the Dragon with the most wonderfully sculpted Chinese dragon I’ve ever seen.
Meanwhile, rack911 celebrates with a depiction of Cai Shen, the God of Wealth, complete with a golden dragon and a bowl for treasure.
