lego

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Gimli at Helmsdeep, Gollum karaoke, Indy brilliance and French Art House – more LEGO® anarchy

Can’t beat a bit of LEGO® stop motion. There’s some truly brilliant stuff around, some of the best knocked up by the Brotherhood Workshop. Here are four of my recent favourites, two from the aforementioned creative team.

This has a great Lord Of The Rings riff on a box (Legolas trying to help Gimli see over the parapets):

Gollum singing the Justin Bieber classic “Baby”:

A lovingly created Indiana Jones pastiche from kd2apoof called “Indiana Jones and the Mystical Gemstone”:

A full-length French thriller, by Maxime Marion and Studio Sepsilon, complete with subtitles (!):

 

 

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To infinity and beyond: Lego’s final frontier?

For those who missed it last month, this is one Romanian teenager’s astonishing and, in a strange way, deeply affecting tribute to the wonder of space exploration and the demise of the shuttle programme.

On 31st December, 2011, Oaida Raul, who has always been fascinated by space exploration (Bob and I know a thing or two about that), launched a Lego replica of the shuttle from a site near Lauda-Königshofen, in Germany. He had found support and backing on the Internet from a random businessman he had made contact with on Twitter and then Skype. They filmed the flight from a camera attached to the same helium balloon as the Lego craft and the HD film of it is simply awe-inspiring.

That combination of boyhood dreams, determination to celebrate the end of a space programme that saw both incredible discoveries and crushing tragedy, technology enabling two people whose world’s would ordinarily never collide to conspire in such a joyful endeavour is a reassuring testimony to humankind in what seem such cold, cruel times.

Read the story in his own words.

And click through to YouTube to watch the video in HD. It really is worth it.

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Lego lunacy

A friend’s Facebook update reminded me how much I used to love Lego® as a kid.

Lego was kept in a special box (and, latterly, when I needed additional storage, an old Quality Street tin). It was a green-coloured wooden box that Granddad had made specially, with brass hinges and brass hooks, and numerous internal compartments. From time to time I would sort the various bricks and planks into types, putting them in different sections. It’s what probably led me to insist on alphabetising my CD and DVD collections…

The living room now looking like an explosion in a Lego factory, I would build space stations in the vicinity of the neighbourhood Lego garage, with spaceships to explore the strange new world of the Christmas tree, its lights twinkling away like stars and its glass baubles dangling like asteroids. Back then, most of the pieces weren’t pre-moulded and so you had to be inventive with the bits you did have to create wings, cockpits, laser cannons etc. Lighting bricks, with a cleverly concealed battery pack, lent these Lego landscapes an eerie quality, especially in the dark, with Lego figurines casting four-inch shadows on the plastic tarmac.

Skip forward twenty years and stop-motion animators have had a world of fun with Lego.

Here are four of my favourites: The Battle For Helm’s Deep (by TXsamwise), Star Wars – The Elevator (by obibrickkenobi), The Letter (by JamesFM) and The Ninja Fight (byLegoDude8000).

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Lego goes loco… Russian-style #lego

Lego was always a favourite toy.

Spaceships, towns, castles… But I never got quite as creative as the Russian who has mixed Lego with the online game Team Fortress 2 and stop-motion animation to create an ultra-violent tribute to one of gaming’s most popular online shooters.

As a gamer, a film enthusiast and a Lego lover of old, this is great. Complete with menacing Russian narration.

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