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The Magazine for LEGO® Enthusiasts of All Ages! Issue 28 • April 2014

8.95

in the US

A BRICKJOURNAL SPECIAL FEATURE

Behind the Bricks of Syd Mead’s LEGO Spinner The Brotherhood Workshop MINDSTORMS Building Instructions AND MORE!

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COMICS MAGAZINES FROM TWOMORROWS ™

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

No. 3, Fall 2013

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DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on cartooning and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews and stepby-step demonstrations from top comics professionals. Most issues contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; Mature Readers Only. Edited by MIKE MANLEY.

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now full-color, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art even more dynamically. Edited by JOHN MORROW.

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Issue 28 • April 2014

Contents

From the Editor....................................................2

People

Building

Minifigure Customization 101: Reimagining The LEGO Movie Collectible Minifigures.............................49 You Can Build It: Micro Pirate Ship...........................................52 Building Robots with MINDSTORMS EV3.........................60

Taj: Making a Movie Taj Mahal ........20 Building The LEGO Movie’s Coliseum............................................................24 The Real LEGO Master Builders............28 Some of The LEGO Movie’s Extras ........38 Recreating The LEGO Movie’s Bricksburg ........................................................42 BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art: Film Camera.....................................................46

It’s a Car! And... ..................................................68 Set Review:#42009 Mobile Crane Mark II.....................................71 From the LEGO Idea House: Building a Name...........................................76 Community Ads..............................................78 Last Word..............................................................79 AFOLs......................................................................80

Sneak Peek .............................................................3 Cities,Stadiums,and Castles.......................4 The Brotherhood Workshop ....................8 Spotting the Spinner ...................................12 Building a Spinner .........................................16

Community

People

Cities, Stadiums, and Castles Article by Joe Meno Photos by Adam Reed Tucker

Adam Reed Tucker is a busy man. As a LEGO Certified Professional, he is doing building projects constantly, and as a builder, he has been involved with the design and launch of the Rollercoaster Factory with Coaster Dynamix. He stepped back from Brickworld, the convention he started, to focus on building. In that time, he has done a number of projects.

Emerald City Adam built the Emerald City as a part of a collaborative build for Brickworld 2013 themed around the Wizard of Oz. Organized by VirtuaLUG, a group of builders in the US and Canada, the build featured scenes from the movie built with LEGO, and was displayed at the Renaissance Convention Center in Schaumburg, IL. To construct the Emerald City, Adam designed using a minimal approach. Using green bricks and gold accents to create art deco-styled towers and connecting bridges, he created a model that evoked the forms of the Emerald City. Custom lighting was created to provide depth and detail to the model and give the illusion that the “Emerald City” was in fact a working, living city as portrayed in the Wizard of Oz. The goal was to provide a seamless integration into the group collab while leaving no question that the segment was the Emerald City that all had imagined while watching or reading The Wizard of Oz. Adam simply tries to capture the essence in his builds, rather than literal recreations.

This piece was completed in only 6 days and barely reached completion, but if you ask Adam, it’s far from complete and plans on a 2.0 are already underway!

People

Spotting the Spinner Article by Joe Meno

In 2012, I had the good fortune of meeting futurist Syd Mead at ComicCon International: San Diego. He was signing posters for the Colonial Marines video game that was being released later that year, and was a delight to talk to. In the short time that we chatted, I inquired about a LEGO model that he had. Ten years prior, he was presented with a model of one of his most famous designs, the Spinner from the movie Blade Runner. Photos of this model have turned up online (most notably through the website BoingBoing) and I wanted to know the story behind it. Syd was more than happy to let me visit his studio and examine the model up close. The story behind the model was a little harder to find. Syd Mead with a Spinner model.

The Spinner LEGO model, rendered by Pixel Fox.

Other views of the LEGO Spinner.

Syd talking about the LEGO Spinner.

To find out how the model came about I had to do some research both online and offline. While Syd Mead’s website mentions a visit to the LEGO Group in 2002 as “VIEW BEYOND 2005″ Guest Speaker and Presenter, there is no information from the LEGO archives of this event. I had to dig a little deeper. Thanks to a couple of e-mails from some retired LEGO designers, I was introduced to Ole Vestergaard Poulsen, Former Vice President of LEGO Innovation. Now a CEO and External Board Member for Product Concept and Marketing - Business Development for Genius Toy Taiwan Co. Ltd, Ole managed the entire creative staff of the LEGO group in the early 2000s. As he recollected, the department was composed of approximately 200 people.

View Beyond 2005 Ole recalls the event: We were conducting a big innovative event where marketing, engineers, designers, and all who participated in the daily work of the LEGO design was present. The big idea was to get inspiration from the outside - so famous people from around the world were invited to come to the LEGO offices in Billund, Denmark to participate in this event. Ole Vestergaard Poulsen: Being a designer myself and being part of the LEGO development for 23 years, I had always been a big fan of Syd Mead. I started when as a very young designer I visited IDEO, Stanford and design schools including Pasadena Art Center. There I got to view of some of his great futuristic design illustrations.

Building

Arlene (Natalie O’Donnell), Vjay’s ex-wife and mother to Priyanthi.

Taj: Making

a Movie Taj Mahal

Article by Joe Meno, Arthur Gugick and Shannon Sproule Photography provided by Arthur Gugick, Shannon Sproule and Oziinda Films Pty Ltd.

Priyanthi (Coco-Jacinta Cherian) and Vjay (Mahesh Jadu) share a moment by the model.

Before the release of The LEGO Movie, there was a movie that had a LEGO model as a central element. The Australian movie Taj, released in 2011, revolved around a father (Vjay) reconciling his relationship with his estranged daughter (Priyanthi) by building with her a LEGO model of the Taj Mahal. However, the model wasn’t built by the movie crew; it was built by an AFOL, Arthur Gugick. Arthur has been featured in BrickJournal before in issue 4, showing his architectural builds. Among those models was his rendition of the Taj Mahal, which can be also seen online. The online gallery was where Arthur was discovered. Arthur remembers, “When Winston Furlong (director of Taj) first contacted me in February 2008, I thought I was being punked. I couldn’t believe that somebody was actually making a movie with a central theme of a LEGO model. He had asked one of the set builders to make a LEGO model of the Taj Mahal and the guy told Winston that he couldn’t do this. So he got online and he googled “LEGO Taj Mahal.” Because I built two models previously he saw them and called me up! I guess I realized he was serious after he started sending me money to my Paypal account in order to pay for the pieces for the LEGO model.” Making the Taj Mahal model for the movie posed other challenges. When Arthur built it, they asked him to build it very sophisticated, but very delicate looking and yet look like it could have been built by a precocious 12-year-old. Winston also had creative control over the model, which is atypical. As Arthur notes, “I would send pictures to him and Winston would say, ‘Make this bigger, make this bigger, make this smaller.’ I would reply, ‘Yeah, but that’s not what the Taj Mahal looks like...’ And he’d answer, ‘You don’t understand, I want it to look good on film.’ So he knew the way it was going to be filmed and how it was going to look. He also knew that when most of the people look at the Taj Mahal, they look at it from the ground, looking at like a 30 degree angle up at it. Most people don’t look at it at eye level. As a result, the model I built was not architecturally sound in some ways, but it does look architecturally sound when it gets filmed.” Another challenge was getting the materials needed to build the model. Winston was trying to get in contact with the LEGO Group and after some effort, finally managed to speak with some people and worked out a deal with LEGO Australia to give him the parts to build a second LEGO Taj Mahal. For this, Arthur had to do an inventory of

every single piece needed and used in the first model. The end result was Excel spreadsheets that were probably 20 sheets long, of every substructure and every piece in these substructures. “The lists were all sent to Winston, who sent it all to LEGO Australia, who said they were getting all the pieces together. The idea was when I arrived in Australia, these 25,000 pieces would be there so I could build the second model.” However, about a week or two before he was supposed to go to Australia, Winston called Arthur with bad news: LEGO Australia backed out of the deal. With about a week-and-a-half before going to Australia, Arthur ordered about 50,000 pieces from 10 different Bricklink dealers. Everything was ordered on special order or next day delivery, so when Arthur arrived in Australia, he had the one trunk with the finished model and then a big suitcase with another 25,000 pieces in it that he had collected in a week-and-a-half. Arthur spent about 10 days in Melbourne building the second model. Shannon Sproule, another AFOL, was there to help and that was pretty wild too. Shannon was the LEGO continuity person. It was Shannon’s responsibility to say, “Here’s where we are on the timeline, I’ve got to take it apart this much or build it up this much using the components I gave him.” They needed the two models for the movie, because the movie is not filmed chronologically. They might need the model built at one stage in one scene and need it built at another stage, so they needed two different models at all times. When asked about the Taj shoot, Shannon recalls, “It was awesome to meet Arthur, he’s such a funny guy and a really clever builder. I was really intimidated at the sheer size of the model initially (I’d never built anything that large before) but after an afternoon of Arthur showing me how the model was built in modular sections I began to breathe once more. I practiced taking it apart and rebuilding it again under his watchful gaze.” About the models, Shannon is pretty explicit:”Thank goodness Arthur built two complete Taj MOCs for the movie; having two replicas enabled me to keep one “finished” model which we only slightly modified for some “in progress” shots while the other one we disassembled quite a fair bit for the scenes where the characters are only just starting to construct the Taj Mahal. Having two saved a lot of time and headaches!”

The initial Taj Mahal model.

Both Taj Mahal models.

Building

Building the LEGO Movie Coliseum Article by Imagine Rigney Imagine with his model.

Building something from a movie is almost always a daunting project. Building from a movie that hasn’t been released is an even bigger challenge. Imagine Rigney takes this in stride: I like a challenge. The LEGO® Movie premiere you say? Build something and get to see the advance screening? Why yes. Yes I can. And I like to build big, so the coliseum scene from the movie trailers was the only way to go—and finally a chance to utilize all the colored bricks and greebly bits in my collection. To be honest, I had no idea that much color in one MOC could actually make me dizzy while building. It’s definitely a High Definition build. Since there were only a few interior glimpses of the structure in the movie trailers, I kept playing those over and over, pausing and taking screen shots so I could piece together what I thought it might actually look like. When I got to the point where my Mom was singing “Everything is Awesome!” around the house all day I knew I’d played them enough. While attending the premiere screening of the movie I think I said out loud, “Oh! It’s a dog!” when finally getting to see the exterior. So I guess the lower section I built is essentially the collar around the dog’s neck—or something like that. The build took five days and a couple of parts orders; I needed more of the round tiles for the coliseum floor and some hinges to get the curve of the walls. LEGO® Movie Coliseum was built by Imagine Rigney for The LEGO® Movie premiere screening display by CoWLUG (www.cowlug.net) at United Artists Colorado Mills Stadium 16 IMAX Movie Theater in Lakewood, Colorado on February 1st, 2014. See more of Imagine’s work on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ imaginebrickzone/ or scanning the following QR code: BrickJournal will have more of Imagine’s work in a future issue!

A look at the outside of the coliseum behind Abraham Lincoln.

Building

The Real LEGO® Master Builders! Article by Joe Meno Photography and art provided by LEGO System A/S. Big Figure session photos by Julien Vandon.

The LEGO® Movie was released with great fanfare and great reviews in February 2014. Only a few years before, though, the movie was only a script. While the story was being sketched out, the look of the movie was being developed. Naturally, the filmmakers teamed up with the LEGO Group’s design team to co-create the models for the movie. Matthew Ashton, Vice President of Design at the LEGO Group, was an important part of the movie design and eventually became one of the Executive Producers of the LEGO Movie. BrickJournal spoke to him about some of the designs that became sets for the movie. BrickJournal: When was the decision to go with a stop-motion animation look made? Matthew Ashton: This was made pretty early on in the process. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the directors, wanted the look to be as true to ‘real’ LEGO® bricks, figures and components as possible. They were also really inspired by the charm and simplicity of the fan-made stop-motion videos you can see online. They wanted to create that look on a much grander cinematic scale. Of course, we were in full support of this direction as we agreed it made a lot of sense, and was a really true representation of our brand and toys. It was also really important that the animation style looked new, fresh and different from the style of animation we use in our TV shows and video games. How was the animation studio chosen? Animal Logic was chosen because they deliver extremely high-quality 3D animation. Their previous work includes animating Happy Feet, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature as well as the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film. Animal Logic also had previous experience working with The LEGO Group, as they produced and animated our 30-minute TV special and DVD/Blue-ray release of LEGO® Star WarsTM: The Padawan Menace. Chris McKay was also brought on board as animation co-director. McKay has directed many episodes of the extremely funny stop-motion show Robot Chicken, so his background, style and humor were a perfect match for overseeing the stop motion look of The LEGO Movie. How was set design handled in the LEGO setting of the movie? All the locations in the movie were pretty much developed between the directors and the team at Animal Logic. We assisted in an advisory role, offering advice here and there on building techniques and providing inspirational models and images. We agreed pretty early on in the process that our main focus from a LEGO Group perspective was to concentrate our collaboration efforts on designing the hero characters, supporting cast and lead vehicles. How was vehicle design determined? This was quite an organic process, working back and forth with the directors and the studio, as it was extremely important that the vehicles looked great and made sense in the movie, but could also work as toys, since the idea is that the film very much reflects what is possible with the actual toys and figures. Different vehicles were designed in very different ways. Very early on in the process we arranged what we call a ‘Design Boost’ to kick the process off. We gathered a large group of designers from multiple projects together to flesh out all the ideas they had for each of the models featured in the script. I had read through the script multiple times, identifying the key vehicles and components that we would need to create. I wrote briefs for the designers explaining how the model would be seen, the role it would play in the movie, and the features or functions it would need to incorporate, as well as basic info like how many characters it would need to seat. The designers then spent three solid days building like crazy to get all of our ideas out. Phil Lord (Director) and Dan Lin (Producer) had flown to Billund to attend the event. What we created within those few days was an awesome starting point for the rest of the movie. From then on Michael Fuller, our Senior Designer on the project, worked on refining these ideas and creating new ones as the movie developed and script changes came in. It took about 6 months to get all the vehicles designed, approved and locked for the movie. As we were working in three different time zones, with the directors based in LA, Animal Logic based in Sydney, and us situated in Billund, Denmark, this required a lot of video conferences and late night phone calls discussing design tweaks until all the models were perfected.

Previous page and above: Michael Fuller (with hat) and Matthew Ashton strike poses with a few of the stars of the LEGO® Movie.

Building

The completed display.

Recreating The LEGO Movie’s Bricksburg Article by Ed Diment

Well, I don’t think anyone can have escaped the fact that The LEGO Movie is upon us. There has been great publicity surrounding the fact and Warner Brothers have been thinking up as many ways to promote the movie as possible… which is where we come in. We are Bright-Bricks, a UK firm of professional LEGO artists headed up by me and my business partner Duncan Titmarsh, the UK’s only LEGO Certified Professionals. In November last year, Warner Brothers and LEGO® UK contacted us with an interesting inquiry. As part of the promotion of The LEGO Movie in Europe, Warner Brothers had decided to have a touring LEGO Movie venue. This would involve a huge truck whose trailer would fold out to create a large internal space where lots of activities would be available for visiting children to get involved in. The crown jewel of this mobile fun palace was to be a copy of part of the set from The LEGO Movie, i.e. Will Farrell’s Bricksburg LEGO town layout. This was to be no ordinary static model; the design was to incorporate a snaking road between the buildings that would allow a LEGO car to travel through the set. Cameras strategically placed in the buildings would then film this drive from different angles before the footage became edited into a mini movie. Best of all, children would get to design and build their own vehicles to allow Emmet, The LEGO Movie lead character, to ride in them along the street. So, our brief was to build the set, incorporate a snaking road, and create a channel in this so that a custom track could run underneath moving a mini platform on which each vehicle would be placed to make its run. We were to simulate the buildings as closely as possible, populate the scene, make skyscrapers nice and tall, fit all of this into a tight, predefined space, and all in a little over three weeks, including design and delivery… oh and Christmas fell in the middle of all this—a piece of cake, then!

What followed was a frantic but enjoyable build, surrounded by construction workers adding steelwork for a new mezzanine floor to our studio/workshop, leaving us with a feeling that a theme of the movie was being echoed right there in our midst. The layout was set at 2.4m (8ft) x 0.75m (30 inches) and as with many of the dioramas we build, this started out with a thick sheet of plywood on which to base the model—this is typically how we introduce rigidity and ease of transport. We were provided with stills from the film, posters and as much other reference material as possible from which to work. Then came a call from Warner Brothers asking if we’d like to come to a private screening of the movie at the company’s headquarters in London for research purposes. Would we? Did they just ask if we want to see The LEGO Movie two months ahead of its official release? Does a LEGO brick hurt when you step on it? Of course! So a couple of days later, there we were watching it. This proved very helpful, especially seeing the set towards the end of the film in quite a lot of detail. We soon realized that the street where Emmet lives is based largely on buildings in the style of the LEGO Café-Corner compatible range of sets. This was a style that a number of us were familiar with, so it became a good starting point for a build. We had deliberately designed the curve of the road to maximize the number of 32x32 stud and 16x16 stud areas we could in order that the buildings could be modular and interchangeable in case Warner Brothers wanted to move them around. Next we had to ensure that each building utilized the 1x4x3 window elements somewhere on their floors and facets. This was due to the fact that these turned out to be just the right size to allow a Go Pro® camera to sit behind one and get an unimpeded shot. Finally, we made all the storeys separate and left out much of the floor to allow cables to be run into the buildings and for the cameras to be set up in a variety of ways.

BrickJournal #28