Flynn Demarco's Treasure of the Snake Queen
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The Magazine for LEGO® Enthusiasts of All Ages! Issue 60 • December 2019 $9.95 in the US Flynn DeMarco’s Treasure of the Snake Queen Stacy Sterling’s LEGO® Haunted House Building A Scene from Alien Instructions AND MORE! 1 82658 00394 4 Issue 60 • December 2019 Contents From the Editor ...................................................2 People Scaling a Mountain: Our Adventure Building Treasure of the Snake Queen .......................3 Iain Heath: Building an ALIEN Moment ....................12 Stacy Sterling’s Haunted Dollhouse .......16 Building Koen Van Der Biest: LEGO Sculptor ...............................................22 Building the New York City Skyline: One Skyscraper at a Time! .......................28 Djordje Dobrosavljevic: Building Beasts! ............................................36 Minifigure Customization 101: Where in the World is .................................40 You Can Build It: MINI Ecto 1......................................................44 Leonid An’s Figure Builds ............................51 Community Building to Heal: Amy Willis and TherapeuticLUG ...........54 Crazy Arms: Custom Poseable Arms for LEGO Minifigures .................................57 Jürgen Kropp: Celebrating Kennedy Space Center ....60 Presenting the Ultimate Skylab Set! ......64 Building the Man on the Moon................70 Building a Space Program: An Interview with Corvin Stichert .......72 Community Ads ..............................................78 Last Word ............................................................79 Bricks in the Middle .......................................80 uilding a small MOC from scratch can be a daunting task. Building a MOCB meant to be 4 ft. square and People 4½ ft. tall is an entirely different level of daunting. Add storytelling, two EV3 brains, eight motors, eight sensors, an arduino microcontroller, lights and sound, and you have a recipe for either success or a mess. Fortunately, our experience was of the former, but there was certainly plenty of the latter along the way! Act 1: Planning & Design Hot on the heels of our Best In Show and Public Choice wins for our first large MOC display, California Dreamin’ (featured in BrickJournal #50), we decided to go in a different direction for our next project. Where California Dreamin’ was wide and sprawling, we went for something tall and relatively narrow. One of the things people seemed to love about CD was the movement and the storytelling. We had small stories happening all through it for people to look at and discover. For this next project however, we thought it would be fun to tell one central story, a narrative that people could follow from beginning to end. We knew people would be walking by in a crowded convention situation and it needed to grab their attention, be short enough to take in quickly, and most importantly, be accessible enough to be understood by anyone watching, regardless of language. Being avid gamers, both video and tabletop, we both have a strong affinity for the fantasy genre. Dungeons & Dragons has been a part of both of our lives, together and separately, for years, so we figured that was a great jumping-off point—a classic adventure story that could be told visually. Once we had settled on that, we looked Scaling a Mountain: at the stories we loved and started picking out classic scenes that people would recognize. Our Adventure Building Like any good D&D adventure, it had to start in a village. The theme Treasure of the Snake Queen for Bricks by the Bay that year was animation and I was immediately Article and Photography by Flynn DeMarco struck by the movement meaning, but also the “cartoon” angle. In my and Richard Board of TrickyBricks head I was watching the cast of Scooby- Doo or the Flintstones running in the Additional Photos by Davin White center of the screen while the same background scrolled behind them on 3 BJ60 Interior.indd 3 9/21/19 1:09 PM Inspiration and sketches are seen here, with rough layouts drawn out on paper. At the right is Maleficent’s castle from Disney’sSleeping Beauty, designed by Evyind Earle. an infinite loop. What if our first scene was a classic D&D party of five (Barbarian, magic user, Dwarven fighter, thief, archer) passing through a village? The concept would be the minifigures moving in place while village buildings, which were built onto 9v train cars, would pass behind them. Once we had established that this was viable, the rest of it all sort of fell together. We would tell our story in six parts, each in a different location. Some of those locations were classic fantasy tropes: Bucolic village, spooky forest, haunted cave, gloomy crypt, and of course, the imposing castle of the titular Snake Queen. But how to move our figures through this epic adventure? When making California Dreamin’, we had experimented with a couple of small mechanics utilizing EV3 motors and sensors, including a moving shark and a bear that popped out of a cave. These were great, but we knew that we would need more than a few simple machines if we really wanted to impress. Even at this early stage, we knew four motors would not be enough to accomplish our many movement goals, so we purchased a second EV3, which gave us another four motors and four sensors to help meet our goals. We also quickly realized that each scene would need its own set of five figures in order for them to be visible in each section. Once the various scenes were settled on, Richard started working on mechanical prototypes, and we decided that conveyor belts would be our best method of movement for the bulk of the story. After some consideration, we felt that six scenes of conveyor belts would get boring quickly, so we opted to utilize turntables for the final two scenes of the story. During this phase we were also looking at source material for the castle. A simple internet search for “spooky The interior of the layout, showing the conveyor castle” resulted in a lot of cool images, but the one we kept coming back to was belts in the center used to move the party Maleficent’s castle from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Designed by exceptional artist of minifigures. Eyvind Earle, it had everything we wanted, and we would return to his designs many times over the building process. We also made several drawings of our own to figure out the eventual layout of the full MOC. The entire initial design and concept phase took about a month, but we would end up changing and adding things in a more organic way throughout the building process. 4 5 <OPEN DISPLAY FILE> </file:DSC_987734> People ........ <RECOVER DATA> ........ Revived from hypersleep, the crew of the Nostromo investi- gates a transmission from the moon LV-426. Discovering a der- elict alien ship, Executive Officer Kane enters and finds a chamber with hundreds of objects that look like eggs. On closer examination, one of the eggs opens… -----**xxx------- <DATA RECOVERY INCOMPLETE> ----------- Kane’s fatal mistake. Interview by Joe Meno Iain Heath: Photos by Iain Heath Building An ALIEN Moment 12 13 In choosing the subject of the build, I followed my normal schtick and fo- cused on the human characters in the movie, as to-date most LEGO builds inspired by the Alien franchise have focused on the aliens and vehicles. I zeroed in very quickly on the iconic facehugger scene, as this represents the turning point of the movie, where it shifts from slow-paced 2001-style sci-fi to suspenseful horror. This is a mo- Totoro (left) and Jabba (above), the sources for ment that forever changed screen sci-fi, Iain’s sphere-derived construction. and has become a very recognizable image. I chose to portray the moment just before the alien hatches, rather than portraying it attached to the character’s face, as I wanted to capture the sense of anticipation that the scene invokes. How did you design and plan the build? Picking the scale was the first step. I usually determine that by deciding how I’m going to build the smallest element —often the eyes—and work up from there. But for this model the visor needed to look authentic, and there were limited parts that would work, so that became the starting point. Next I tracked down reference material for this scene: Stills from the movie, photos of resin models other people had made, and some great shots of The layout in daylight. the original spacesuit prop taken from multiple angles. The egg was straightforward, as I de- cided to adapt the same sphere build- ing technique I used for my Totoro and Jabba builds. Dark tan can be a hard color to source parts for, and this technique only relies on simple plate elements. The character is built with articulated joints so that I could lock down the pose at the end, and sculpt the suit around the joints to cover the gaps. The base was also a vital part of the design, both to provide a place to lay out the egg’s tendrils, as well as pro- viding a way to anchor the character in place (his feet are actually connected securely to it). How long did it take to complete? This was a solid 40-hour build, spread over a two-week period. What was the hardest part to build? The shoulder pads. They’re curved in multiple directions and trying to cap- 14 ture that at this scale (and incorporate 15 People Stacy’s Haunted Dollhouse. In our house, it’s Halloween most of the year—spooky decorations, lots of black, skulls... you get the idea. Growing up, I was the kid who spent her summers eagerly accompanying Nancy Drew on her adventures and solving mysteries; watching episodes of the Addams Family and wishing that I could be Wednesday Addams; staying up late to watch episodes of Tales from the Crypt and scaring myself in the process.