Retro
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Disclaimer: I'm not the Harry Potter fan in our house. But I've never understood the hatred for the Cursed Child. I thought it had some of the charm of the HP books/films. Certainly I would say that we had more fun reading it aloud as a bed time story than we had watching either of the FB films which I found rather dull and underwhelming. But then I like The Last Jedi, so what do I know.
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Q&A: What is your favorite LEGO Vehicle?
Retro replied to Driver Brandon Grumman's topic in LEGO Town
I have a photo in my hand of me on holidays in Italy in 1982 holding 6653 and 6628 in my hands! I also owned 375 at the time. All classics... -
Q&A: What is your favorite LEGO Vehicle?
Retro replied to Driver Brandon Grumman's topic in LEGO Town
Favourite Official Set: 6653 Highway Maintenance Truck Favourite MOC by others: Citroen 2CV by Misterzumbi Favourite MOC/MOD by me (standing on the shoulders of giants): Jango Fett's Slave 1 -
Really interesting comparison. I don't think I know the ship but it's fun to see two different approaches to building it. Well done to both.
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@rodiziorobs thank you @MAB I added a few more bricks to the wall (ahem) so that I had more sky to aim at, and by taking various contorted positions tried to view the heads from lower down to make them look larger and more menacing!
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Very nice scene. The lighting is fine. I do eat meat but I still feel sorry for the bunny! #cognitivedissonance
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Thanks for the feedback @Littleworlds. I've always liked The Division Bell (and A Momentary Lapse of Reason). I'm not English, but for me TDB has always had the feeling of the best parts of England, a quiet, pastoral timelessness. I was re-reading about the heads recently in Mind Over Matter by Storm Thorgerson. One of the great things about them is that so many versions were produced (physically or graphically). There were the two physical types. Yes, I followed the outline shape of the metal, rivetted heads, but you could say I was more following the texture of the stone heads! I think to try and add the subtle details of the curves under the eyes, or indeed the rivets of the metal heads might end up with models looking too 'childish', not to say be impossible to do well at that scale. My models are really a bit of a hoax. The models are very small and have a very ugly rear and side view since they are built from a variety of odd bricks tenuously fixed together (but they are fixed - you could lift each one by the top of the head). So, unlike say a lovely Lego spaceship that you can view from all sides, my set up is a small viewed-from-the-front-only scene, where I've used available lighting and then filters as much as possible just as an exercise to make nice photos.
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Thanks @MAB. Do you mean adding texture to the statues themselves, or to the 'sky' and 'fields'? With every kind of Lego model you have to make approximations of some kind for the scale you're working at. (For example, I ignored the slope on their noses - too hard to achieve at this scale.) For the background (in the brick built scene), I decided maybe the sky and fields looked better as just blocks of colour since the profile of the statues was powerful enough. I did think of experimenting with brick built clouds etc... The angle of the mouths is already as forced as I could make it, since the cathedral is only about 100mm behind the statues. To make it any more realistic I think you would need to increase that to about 300mm and then the 'sky' and 'fields' would need to become enormously wide to fill the camera shot!
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I couldn't resist using a few more filters which seemed kinda' Floydian...
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When Pink Floyd announced in around 1994 that they would be releasing new music after a long hiatus, no one was happier than their art department (Storm Thorgerson and friends) who finally had a new project to get their teeth into. One of the main results of their new work was the iconic scene of the two heads talking to each other. There were many different versions of this concept produced, both physical statues and drawings. I have not followed them literally but just chose what I thought looked nice! For Lego and Pink Floyd purists, this one is all Lego and is also the closest I got to what was on the CD cover, with Ely Cathedral in the background. Number 1: The Division Bell Some of my other experiments were as follows; The music on the album was not well-received critically at the time, but I think it has gone on to become a minor classic.
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@LEGODrongo01 No, not me. If you click on one of my pictures and look in the Flickr albums you will see that, while mine is similar, the way I connect onto the body of the ship is different because I have a door there. I based mine on Flynn2000, who in turn based it on Flail, who I presume invented the method. I don't know if this link works. But the trick is to get that cockpit assembly to sit at just the right position vertically and horizontally to fit the figures! http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=86875
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@Kit Bricksto I added an album of pictures on Flickr. It's fiddly and imperfect but it does mean Chewie can sit on a red chair (I spent aeons trying to decipher the Flynn/Flail pictures.) @LEGODrongo01 For the floor, I covered the whole floor of 7965 with plain dark bley plates, with one or two small areas of dark bley or black grills. I think your floor is maybe a bit too random, as you say. Plus tiles mean you can't stand the figs. But it's all a matter of taste. Great to see your progress.
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I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'The main hold', but it looks to me like you could still fit a small holochess area in the front, and then put the rest in the back (hyperdrive, bedroom, weapons rack, various interesting looking machinery!). Your lighting boxes seem to be taking up less space in the latest photos. Have you removed some of them or just 'tidied them up' a bit?
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Does (not) enjoying a movie/series influence your purchase decisions?
Retro replied to Flieger's topic in LEGO Star Wars
I can see this is a perfect place for people to express the opinion that while there are (nearly) 11 Star Wars films only one (or two at a push) are any good. See also; the opinion that there are only two good Alien films, two good Godfather films, two good Indiana Jones, one good Blade Runner and so on and so forth! In relation to the original question, did you see these fabulous MOCs (not mine). If Lego made something as good as this, would you change your mind? Also, I have no interest in Ninjago, and the movie was...not good...but Ninjago City is an epic Lego set, that I did buy. -
Not meaning to hijack LegoDrongo01's thread (!), but this was what I ended up with for 7965's interior. It would nice to have a thread to gather together all non-UCS size Falcon models! I must have spent months tinkering with this while watching The Good Wife (with the good wife). Falcons like this are perfect to experiment with because the exterior is basically a hunk of junk, and the interior is an empty box (unless it's filled with excellent lighting equipment!) waiting to be turned into rooms.
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Looks great. Nice and solid and menacing. Good bulky mandibles. For the cockpit I just followed the Flynn/Flail method as best as I could. Chewie leans a bit because of his sandwich head (and I still used actual seat pieces because I loved the Flynn/Flail red chairs), but maybe not that much? Would be fun to see you add an interior some time.
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[SURVEY] Frontpage News Review: Have YOUR say...
Retro replied to Mister Phes's topic in Forum Information and Help
I do think Star Wars is under-represented on the front page so if someone like @Reaper got involved it would be great. (Good luck trying to decide which AT-ST to feature though!) We recently had a lovely Labdspeeder contest which was almost invisible on the site. Whereas the Technic Mission to Mars contest is featured on centre on the front page... -
Very cool. I like the photo in front of the Sinister Jars.
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You have expressed yourself eloquently. I shall put in my two cents worth in order to bring balance to the force. Disney were faced with a difficult choice when they came to make the new films. The prequels were derided in most quarters (I have no problem with them apart from dear Hayden). If they had tried something really creative and it had bombed that could have sunk Star Wars forever. Get too far away from Jedi and Stormtroopers and it might not feel like Star Wars at all anymore. Go into the past and it's another prequel. Go far into the future and you're fundamentally changing the timeline forever. Do something away from the main saga, like a heist movie, and it can end up feeling inconsequential. So they decided to 'sort of' remake the original trilogy with some new wrinkles. Kylo struggling to be bad instead of good! Kylo having a tantrum and wrecking his room instead of killing the officer! The hero is a girl not a boy. Etc. TFA and TLJ are not perfect. And they don't make a lot of sense. But my family and friends and I still enjoyed them. Good space-opera adventure films. And the critics liked them. If you hated them that's absolutely fine too. Maybe you'll prefer the next trilogy.
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That looks like a fun project. Are you making it up from scratch, or taking inspiration from some other source? Will you try and build it in real bricks eventually?
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Dublin, of course ;)
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I think this is a telling comment. I know there is a sizeable Star Wars contingent that wants a gritty tone to any new productions. I suppose Star Wars is such a huge entity now that they have a very diverse audience to cater for. I don't mind a bit of 'gritty'. I loved Blake's 7 and the Battlestar Galactica reboot (until the ending). But 'gritty' is not what I personally want from Star Wars, at least not all the time. For me, Star Wars is just as much about a cute teddy bear called Wicket being scared of a hat, and a Gungan called Jar Jar getting his tongue caught in energy binders, and a Stormtrooper hitting his head off a door accidentally as it is about Anakin getting three of his limbs cut off. I didn't greatly love Rogue One. It was gritty-heading-into dull, I thought... Mandalorian trailer does look handsome though. Could be good.
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LEGO Star Wars 2019 Set Discussion - READ FIRST POST!!!
Retro replied to Stash2Sixx's topic in LEGO Star Wars
Well, I would say two things. Firstly, Lego can only make what Lucasfilm/Disney gives them, I suppose. And Disney took the choice to go 'old school' in the Sequels. Their approach must have worked to some extent because TFA and TLJ got good critical reviews. But it made for boring Lego. Secondly, I don't think Lego is making the most of the licence. (Artistically anyway. Maybe they're making heaps of money). The Resistance cartoon (which I don't watch) had some lovely ships out of which Lego somehow ended up making the two most boring. And making them too 'studdy'. -
* Buying Lego is an environmentally unfriendly hobby. * Most Friends sets get built once then gather dust and are never played with or used for MOCs. *Most modern children in most countries have no interest in Pirates, Castles, Cowboys (or Classic Space). *The Padawan Menace and The Yoda Chronicles were much funnier, charming and more inventive than any of the Lego movies.
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@BEAVeR Yep, I did try the flat silver grill tiles the other way around first and while that probably made more engineering sense, I felt they looked more streamlined the way I put them, certainly for the 'top' view of the ship. Maybe one day I will move the cockpit one stud forward. But, to accommodate the orange fins in their V2 position, I already had to make the body one stud wider each side so I was really running on fumes as far as pieces were concerned! And I wanted it to still be stable enough to swoosh. That's genius about the Opee Sea Killer. I shall re-name it thus on Flickr. The Pink Table (C) might return in summer 2020!