Joe Klang (derjoe) has provided the perfect opportunity to sit in the hot and summery wastelands from Australia. There was a time when Mel Gibson was considered kind of cooler than an anti-semitic drunk. And Max Max comes very much from that time. In his second recent car-based diorama Joe shows why. You can almost hear the soft murmur of the thunderous engines of Toecutter’s merciless bike gang heading this way. The last of the V8 Interceptor’s is sitting calmly and waits…
Advance has been making LEGO tv commercials for over 30 years and recently they rediscovered many classic commercials in their archives. They will be releasing them online over the next ten weeks, so look for them here, with a bit of commentary from the people involved in their creation.
I am a big fan of vintage LEGO ads and commercials, so I’m pretty excited about this project. Come take a trip down memory lane with Advance and The Brothers Brick!
Blast from the Past Trailer video:
Spyrius (1994):
Art director Christian Faber says:
“We shot this in London or LA, I can’t actually remember! It was one of the first motion control spots we did. At 0:15 We used a kind of ‘magic building’ technique where the bricks are held on the end of metal rods and then pulled apart. And if you look closely at 0:00 you can actually see the edge of the studio in the top
left corner.“The set filled a whole studio and we used a lot of analogue techniques — the planet is just painted cardboard and the backdrop is just a screen with
little holes in it and a big light behind it. The hands you can see moving the sets at 0:05 and 0:21 secs are actually wax hands. I had quite a lot of
explaining to do when customs asked why I had a bag full of fake arms!”
Technic Racers (1997):
Faber says:
“We shot it in a specially built 10-metre tunnel that was hand-painted and filled with smoke. While it may look straight, if you look closely at 00:15
you can see the yellow lines bending slightly — that’s because at this point we filmed the car in a carousel to make it look like it was speeding
forward! The animatronic hand was cast on a girl’s hand so it was a perfect fit and gave her the control she needed in the more complicated movements.”
Wild West (1996)
Faber says:
“We juxtaposed stills of the LEGO sets being ‘magic built’ with lots of scenes from classic American Westerns. The last few shots featuring the fight scene
were filmed and then graded to fit in with the rest of the background scenes. The magic building techniques shown here are actually illegal now —
the law today requires that toy sets that need to be constructed have to be shown being built by hand.
For his local (Cologne) LEGO brand store recently, Joe Klang (-derjoe-) built a scene from Gran Torino. What I find particularly attractive about this scene is how inorganic it feels, while reflecting the movie so well. It almost feels like a platform game version of the film with the straight lines, diagonal grid and textural elements. And the neat suburban lawn feels even more sterile than in real life.
Thanks to Alex Jones for the heads up
I don’t have much to say about this new creation by Peter Reid (legoloverman) except that it’s just great. The use of minifig sextants to build a cube is brilliant, and makes a perfect micro scale Borg cube. It’s hard to think of a more ridiculously single purpose-part, and yet it works quite well to add detail at this tiny scale.
Raphael Heusser‘s mashup of Cars and Star Wars yields hilarious results. Never would I have imagined a cross between Lightning McQueen and the Millennium Falcon prior to seeing this creation.
If you’ve seen the cartoon Samurai Jack, you’ll undoubtedly recognize Stephen Pakbaz’s (Apojove) creation of Jack vs Aku.
But, you say, this little scene by Gabriel Thomson (whose more recent LEGO version of the Göbekli Tepe archaeological site we blogged a week ago) is a Star Trek scene! What’s with the Monty Python reference, Andrew?
Wait, what’s that on the viewscreen? And who’s that in the fez?
Egads! It’s the Crimson Permanent Assurance!
I suspect the crew of the Enterprise will be completely fine in the face of marauding financiers. They do, after all, have a certain Time Lord on board…
Via The Living Brick, my favorite minifig-centric blog.
The official high-res image of 6860 The Batcave has been released. There are also additional pictures of 2012 sets from Star Wars, Cars, Spongebob, and Series 7 Minifigs posted on FBTB’s Flickr photostream.
Garry King likes building ships from the Battlestar Galactica universe, and he likes them big. His newest Battlestar Berzerk is so large that it requires internal supports for this 54-pound behemoth. More pictures and detailed descriptions are on MOCpages.
The easy way to write this post would be to make references to a classic 1975 film directed by Mr. Gilliam and Mr. Jones. It would be in poor taste to write, for example, of how the subject of the below creation ignored the protests of his people (“Help! Help! I’m bein’ repressed!”) and how the feeble are disrespected and sent to an early grave.
It would be in further poor taste toss insults of elderberries and make demands for shrubbery. One that’s not too large.
So to avoid such unsavory comments, I will merely leave you with Mr. Tom Williamson‘s visual representation in poor taste of the above:
In all seriousness, these are pretty fabulous. If you’d like to see these in person, I have it on good authority that these will be live at BrickCon this year!
Carl Greatrix is a designer for the official Lego games, and his design of the Flying Dutchman for the Lego Pirates of the Caribbean video game shows why he’s the man for the job. Even though this is a render, just about all the parts used are official Lego elements.
