fallentomato

So for one of my upcoming animations I'm going to have someone use a slightly modified 7632 (with a wrecking ball) to knock over the Green Grocer. However I need to show this from close up and far away, so I made mini versions of the two sets for the far away shot. Here's the normal size for comparison Because of my extremely limited sand green collection I had to make some compropmises, but I think it turned out alright.

Just did this for fun I based it on this pic. Hope you like them.

I guess this falls under Aquaraiders, though ti's a little silly. I won set 774, Crab Crusher at Brickworld this year, but I already had one copy of it put thogether and as awesome as it is, I didn't really need another giant submarine. But I couldn't bring myself to just dump the pieces into my collection, so I did an alternate build for hte set and came up with this, the Court of King Octopus The little crab is trying to see the King, but the King's enchanted Golem Guards are steadfast The king passes the time by being entertained by his pole-dancing Tentaclen slave and playing with his pet coral, Chester In case of danger the king can escape in his Getaway Throne thought he looks rather silly when doing so Just out side his court there is the skeleton of an Aquaraider who feel off his Underwater Speeder after colliding with this Junk Coral I hope you like it. I had a lot of fun putting it together More pictures on flickr

Sounds like an awesome weekend. The Mecha is a fun build and you can't beat those figs. I'm also a fig fan of Dollar Bill and Dyna Mite. Happy building!

I hope the Altantean side gets good representation (unlike the rock monsters), based on the translated set names it sounds like that may be the case. As for the PM wheels - it's possible that as prelim pics they just used whatever wheels were on hand and will be replacing the wheels in the final versions. But more likely this is what we're getting. The color scheme boggles me, red, black and trans lime green? Really? I was with it until the trans-lime-green. Why not trans-red? It's been a while since we've gotten nice big trans-red pieces. Well it's hard to tell much from prelim pictures so I'll wait till we have something more substantial to really lay down judgment. Right now Ill go with cautious optimism. That too

The line around Trewlaney's mouth indicate age to me. Of course And in fact, Velma doesn't. But there are other ways to differentiate faces like eyelashes and eyebrows. It'd be nice if Lego didn't always use all of them at once when creating female heads. As a result we get these hyper-feminine figs and the gender neutral figs and very little in between. I'd love to see more variation in general. But also I just want a head that's more appropriate for Tina Fey

I was working on making minfigs of the Scooby Gang this evening and when I got to Velma I realized that I didn't have a female head with regular glasses. Crazy futuristic sunglasses? Sure! Quidditch Googles? Check! Tiny black mask that doesn't fall off of your face even when you are running across rooftops in full face make-up? Of course! And I grant that these are all important types of eyewear for any modern woman (and awesome heads which I am proud to own) but what about plain old, eyesight-enhancing glasses? I found this Trewlaney head But that is clearly an older woman. I eventually settled on this head, which is pretty gender neutral, but still Velma looks mannish. How have other people dealt with this issue? I know plenty of girls who wear glasses, and I don't know how I would make them into minifigs (something I do pretty commonly for my friends)

It's the Headless Horseman! err.... headless chopperman? Either way it's creepy.

I was just thinking about this. I may have to try doing this with parts of a larger set. For instance I have an unopened Crab Crusher - the Crab is probably in it's own bag...

Wow! Just wow! This truly is an incredible accomplishment. Thanks for sharing it so thoroughly! I appreciate the way you pointed out all the cool details. I really like the technique you used for the beach and rocky slopes in other areas.

I did this last year. It's mean to do it to a set with a minifig in it because then they can't breathe! But I'm just twisted like that

Yes, studs are lovely! Also, if you put tiles over all the studs, where are the minifigs going to stand?

I'd like to see a kitchen/break room where the miners can have a cup of coffee and a banana. Also make sure that there's a Rock Monster jail/confinement area of some sort.

I like Noble the best, but I think that Drow is the most elf-like of these. They are all very cool though.

That's interesting, I would have never thought of this as being something people would be opposed to. I store all my hands and arms separately. I've found that some of the older arms are more brittle and don't hold up to this as well, so I'm more likely to leave those attached especially if they are already starting to show signs of fracture. But aside from colors that out of production arms are very easy to replace, so it's not big loss to me if a few have broken out of the thousands I have. Really only once? I've done this so many times I couldn't even count. There are just so many hip/leg color combinations that you'll never find from the standard version. That said I don't like to do this all the time, so I always make sure I don't already have that leg/hip combination somewhere else. I've noticed that some times the hip joint will be weak, but again it's such a small occurrence relative to the number of legs I have that it's insignificant. T

I made a couple new MOCs for my latest animation. As usual, most of them are only facades or only have 2 walls. Here's a Ridiculously High Security Prison: A microscale college campus And a mosaic floor i thought was cool Some more pics on flickr Hope you like them!

These are all creepy in different ways. But I still find to be the creepiest I've seen.

Not familiar with that but here are a couple of my inspirations. The style is an homage to the Sally Struthers distance education commercials from the mid 90s. This one is a pretty good example: While the evil overlord list didn't direct influence this movie, it certainly has impacted the way I think about villains. And then there's my childhood spent watching cartoon villains like Snidely Whiplash and Dick Dasterdly and the like. SVELT will certainly be making more appearances throughout the NNN series. In fact, my very next video will be an interview with a SVELT spokesperson about the escape of Malifios (from Out of Bonds). My plan for the series is to use these "commercial break" videos to give people a sense of the broader world of the series so the news stories have more context. Does that answer your question?

Hmm, maybe it's based on how your opinons compare to the general opinion. So if you always consider things more okay that the mean (that little dot) than you get a 0.00. That's what I got too and my arrows were all to the left of the dots also. Guess that makes you a heathen too

Yeah, I probably should have tried to make a splash out of bricks, but I didn't think about that until after I'd already animated. Thanks! I do indeed animate to the voice. My basic process is this: 1) I come up with a script. This SVELT commercial is part of a larger script I finalized about a year ago. 2) I record the voices. I recorded the Thug voice in April and the SVELT woman voice in May. 3) Build the sets, characters and props. The SVELT welcome area I built a while back and the orange prison was recycled from a previous animation, but everything else was built in June or July. 4) Make an animatic. First I take still images of the sets and charcters so I can get a sense of how I want each scene composed. Then I pull this into my editing software (I use Final Cut) where I've edited together all the voices. This way i can figure out how long each shot/scene should be and have a rough idea how it's all going to look. This is also when I figure out exactly how many frames each movement is going to be. I'll pick out the words where I think the character would put emphasis and figure out what motion they'll do for it. I did that a couple weeks ago for hte SVELT commercial 5) Animating! The camera I use is a Sony DSC-H7 which I picked out for having a really good close focus, which is important when your subjects are only a few centimeters from the lens. Unfortunately it can't be controlled by a computer, so I can't use it with animation software that has onion skinning so I animate "blind". Just have to remember where I put everything. I did all the animation for this commercial over the past week. 6) Editing. Putting everything together. This is where I'll add sound effects an other things. I usually do this in little chunks as I finish animating each scene. I can't wait to see it come to life after I finish animating.

That poor victim! Everything bad happens to him. My favorite of these is the ant attack. I like when his face turns into a skull. :skull: Do you have other accidents planned for him?

I should go to sleep now, but I wanted to post this here first. And the link to Let me know what you think

As "quantum sculptors" (to steal a term from Roy Cook) we already have lots of rules imposed on us. While all sculptors have to worry about the limitations imposed by gravity and structural stability, we also are limited to by a set number of shapes (and colors) and the ways those shapes can connect to one another. When I build something that I'm going to animate with, I have to worry about it holding positions between frames and not causing any lighting problems (thus I use fewer chrome pieces than I would like). Adding another set of restrictions just seems silly to me. If LEGO doesn't make a piece in the color I need it, I will paint without a second thought (unless it's a really rare special piece). If the top half of a piece is causing problems I will cut/file it down. If a competitor or fan company makes a really cool accessory or piece that is clearly lacking from the LEGO line (I don't care for the super specialized guns, but stuff like the Brickforge crowbar and microphone were instant buys) I will throw that piece in with the rest. I also don't mind mingling fleshies and yellow minifigs with Belville and Fabuland characters. Pretty much anything goes in my world of bricks. But like I said, I'm a LEGO heathen And actually, why not bring out the welder? Might take "Black Fantasy" MOCs to a whole new level

Very cool. The animation was very slick.

So now it's a real ghost train. :skull: It looks nice too for being undead.