Tag: Legos

I told my wife I had to have the video capture card to digitize my 8mm tapes, but realistically the main thing I wanted it for is to make stop-action Lego movies. I’ve already got a couple of ideas and am busy assembling Lego sets, though I probably won’t find the time until this summer to actually do this.

There are a number of Lego movies on the Internet, such as this amusing takeoff of horror films, All of the Dead. The camera work is pretty shaky in some parts, but the scenes of the minifigs rising from the dead is priceless (and unlike my plans, these folks actually used a real film camera).

Of course if you want to make a Lego movie, you’re going to need lots of Legos and there’s no place like BrickBay to get your fix. As the name suggests, this is basically an E-Bay style portal devoted exclusively to Legos. One of the good things about buying here is you can get large quantities of basic blocks of a single color at a far lower price than Lego sells them for, as well as finding mint-in-box versions of some of the cool but out of print Lego sets such as the pirate series.

Finally, you’re going to want to build your own sets with those Legos. Sure there are some really cool sets out there, but probably not quite exactly everything you need. I love Legos, but I confess I am very engineering deficient. There’s no way I could sit down with a bunch of Legos and just build a masterpiece.

Which is why there’s LDraw. LDraw is basically just a CAD program that is designed to help build things out of Lego. Toy around with your design in LDraw and then print out complete building instructions and parts requirements on your laser printer. What could be more cool than that? Oh yeah, it’s completely free!

Someone a lot more creative than I am used the Lego Mindstorms kit to build a Lego-based CD changer that takes a digital photo of the dance floor and changes the music if there is no one dancing. Amazing stuff.

Dave (no last name I could find) has finished a complete medieval town built out of Legos, which looks nice.

Even more amazing is Anthony Sava’s extensive Lego sets for his Kingdom of Ikros site.

I am about to get started on a huge multimedia project that’s going to eventually involve a Lego set-up something along these lines, and these two pages have a lot of great ideas for medieval/fantasy Lego getups.

Ever wanted an excellent tutorial on using Photoshop to enhance the look of your Lego photos? Sure you have. Find it here.