MOC: Oin

 Dwarves do not arrive all-in-one packs, so here's Oin (portrayed by talented Kiwi actor John Callen) in your service, brave northern dwarf and pharmacist of Thorin Oakenshield's company.

This was, like Balin and Dwalin, an interesting character to build. I started with the head and beautifully braided beard. I got the handcuff idea previously, and I had to built this older gentleman just for use that design. I came out pretty well, I think. The basic shapes of the head are quite similar than on my previous dwarves, but I altered the nose and some other bit to make them look individuals.

Like Dwalin, Oin has movable arms. The shoulder joints are built using T-bar hinges (one of the best pieces ever) and elbows are ball joints. The hands have six points of articulation on each. I gave him tight fingers as he has fabulous knitted mittens on the movie.

Another part of the original idea was using "brick-bricks" on the woollen cardinal as the texture of the overcoat. I like the effect. The torso has quite a lot SNOT on it, as it it built studs facing on the both sides. It isn't the stablest build I have ever done, but stays intact pretty well. He has a belt like other dwarves and a grey scarf.

The boots were a bit challenging. They they have quite a flat and rounded shape which was hard to shape with my limited arsenal of oddly-shaped brown parts. Well, they are not especially flat, but at least they have round shape and those wool shreds on them.

The staff was interest, too. I made several concepts, but didn't have needed pieces for all of them. Now I think that the final design of the ends is a bit oversized, but at least the shape is right... I will change them a bit before the next exhibition or show.

I'm already building the next dwarf, the one who is vegetarian, but I might take some time before I can finish him. I'm not sure if I have enough pieces, but we will see that. I've already built the head, and that's usually the most fun and interesting part.

-Pate-keetongu

EDIT: Here's a reference pic:

MOC: Dwarf brothers Balin & Dwalin

 I've spend hours and hours of browsing pictures and concept art about The Hobbit movies during the passing year. It's a fantastic film (and luckily we have more to wait for) and has some incredibly cool designs. Here's couple of dwarves, Balin (fantastically portrayed by Ken Stott) and Dwalin (Badassly portrayed by Graham McTavish), old fighters and loyal friends and relatives of Thorin Oakenshield.

You may remember  Balin from the bust I made on December. I wanted to built the whole figure back then, but I thought that I wouldn't have enough dark red. But some time later I came up with an idea how to built those beautiful ornamental bits on his jacket using cheese pieces hold between 1x2x2 panels. It looked very good, so I couldn't resist building the rest of Fundin's son. The panels are Trans-black, so the cheese slopes used are normal red and DBley.
 The only movable parts are the fingers, but Balin is more of a counsellor that fighter anyways. He also has a boots with the same ski-slope motif than in his white beard. And yes, those are SW engine blocks used as the sleeves.

Dwalin was a lot harder fellow to build. He is quite of a fighter, the "Scary biker" of the dwarves, as actor Graham McTavish mentioned. I wanted to give him movable arms so I could pose him with his warhammer and axes. But the hardest part was letting go not ta the angled fur pieces on his shoulders. The battle droid arm  design was here from the start, I liked the pattern of mixed tan and dark tan pieces, but I tried couple of alternatives before this one. It's surprisingly hard to add odd-shaped angled parts to basic SYSTEM builds like this.

The weapons Dwalin uses were eather fun to build. The axes can be putted on his back.  They're quite simple, but I like their dwarven feel. the warhammer was a bit trickier one, as it has some shapes that are pretty impossible to capture with LEGO bricks, but I think I succeeded pretty well.

Dwalin's legs look quite small in these photos. Now I think I should have put them a bit further from each other, but it's also the angle of these photos which makes them look a bit odd. It's tricky to photograph these stiff SYSTEM figures with all that Bionicle stuff.

Pic for reference, taken from http://heirsofdurin.files.wordpress.com

Killing a dragon and reclaiming the lost homeland is not a job for pair of dwarves, so I promise there will be (at least one) more. More of that later. But it will have something to do with bad hearing and mixing up ravens and thrushes...

-Pate-keetongu

Heroes of Steam

There's a new Collectable minifigure series available, so I naturally made another steampunk figbarf! This time we have a traditional adventurous group of heroes from Victorian era.

Prof. Murdstone Fitzharris Melvin, inventor and user of revolutionary Remote Oral Communication Apparatus, ROCA. He calls it "cell phone" because of steam-thrust cell technology it uses. The apparatus is very light to carry around, as it weights only frankly 80 KG. It's a very handy tool when the party travels around the victorian world.



Dolores F. Hiney, one of the best gunslingers in Richmond. She's often referred as "Sister White Tender" by other adventurers, but actually she is more like a anti-tender. Hiney uses her trustworthy Pigeon-Giffor G17 musket she inherited from her mother and many different fiery cocktails named after famous Russian war-time politics. Being a excellent gunslinger, decent pilot and practical fighter, she an important part of the team. Hiney has a one weakness though: she knows nothing about cooling systems of steam engines.

 Professor Johanne Bowler Madill is the well-educated chemist of the group. She knows many potions and solutions, and carries a surprisingly big number of flasks and bottles in her two bags and the folds of her long dress. Nobody else of the group has even seen her legs, not even an ankle, so they think that she has a small trolley full of chemicals on which she stands. That would explain why she is two plates taller than everyone else!

Doktor Pahael von Knalli is the prolonged leader of Heroes of Steam. He has a pair of robotic lenses with many different devices and gadgets. His fashionable bowler has hidden circular saw on it (they have torn his suit, too... you know Monday mornings, they existed on the Victorian age too) and his rifle uses the newest technology available. Despite his old age Doktor still has very flexible limbs.

Maiden Selina B. Knalli is a beloved daughter of Doktor von Knalli. She's a rather flashy person, brilliant tracker and fearless adventurer. Selina especially likes jobs that include undercover missions, underworld pubs and pursuit on narrow alleys. Fortunately she has a father who's not too custodial or conservative in what comes to women's status on Victorian world. Selina's weakness is folk dance.

Thompson Esmond Hayes Jr., the unbelievable helipack-man, is a young gentleman with mind full of splendid (and mostly very dangerous) ideas and inventions. Thompson has quite a big beliefs of himself as a savior of young children and beautiful women. He's a big aficionado of rotor technology over rocket packs. Bunch of headless trailblazers is always better than those ugly smoke trails on sky, after all.

Egbert Breakey Flynn is a stereotypic muscular mechanic of the group. Excpectably he can fix pretty much everything that has cogs or valves on them. But the has an another side: Egbert is certifiably the best noughts-and-crosses player in the world. That's why he oftet carves a small grids with circles and crosses on the surfaces.

-Pate-keetongu

Poseable minifig arms

I've built lots of minifigs lately. Today morning I took photos of 21 minifigs. I took the pics outside, as the lightning is a lot better there. I tried to shoot some of them few weeks ago indoors, but the pics didn't work out. Luckily it was only -5C and clear weather. Finnish winter is dark and long (but very beautiful).
These figs are an example of poseable arm design I came up with one day. It may of may not have been done before, I don't know. It simply uses small snippets of pneumatic hose that can be connected to both mifig hands and torsos' arm holes. It's surprisingly sturdy design, especially with the old "empty" torsos.
I will likely use this technique on my upcoming MOCs and figs. It allows some more dynamic poses (I especially like the mafioso on the left) and also works as a purist option to V&A Steamwork's ingenious straight arms. Pneumatic hose isn't very expensive on Bricklink, so this isn't going to kill anyone's wallet. Feel free to use if you find this interesting.

-Pate-keetongu

Brickfilm: Jukolan Humppa

It's time to go back into basic LEGO business after my super-popular (at least on my standards) Big Daddy MOC that pretty much gave this blog six times more visitors that I had had on it whole history. Big thanks to everyone who blogged and commented.

But on a second thought, this isn't basic business neither. It's LEGO animation debut of Vuhvelituotanto, the very indie video production that consists of me and my friend (Known as Humppakeksi in LEGO community). We have done several short life action films, but this is our first video released online. Without further ado, be ready to some serious humppa!

So, that was it, Humppa of Jukola, song by Finnish humppa cover group Eläkeläiset, which has had some appearances in this blog before.As you probably noticed, the name of the game is alcohol. No, wait. I was saying that you probably noticed that we used my Humppa-Pub as a fake scene prop on the playing scenes. The adventurous orienteering prop was built in couple of hours using BURPs, baseplates and some plates and plant pieces to add detail.

 As I said, this is our animation debut. And I really mean it. Doing a LEGO animation is often said to be hard and time-consuming work, and we wanted to test the veracity of that rumor. We didn't do any test shots. Pretty much every pic taken is on this films. I had built the outdoor prop the previous evening, and Humppakeksi came here on the morning and we made the animating in two hours. When it comes to filming, we were ready for dinner before midday.

 Later on the same day we squeezed the pics into Monkeyjam and made the stop-motion clips. Neither of us had used that software before, but luckily it was rather easy to use despite the lags and bugs in it. Humppakeksi took the clips and made the editing on the next day on his computer. I guess he's lot better than me in that (and he always does that on our films). The video was done in two days. It was not especially hard or time-consuming.

Of course the quality of the animation is not the best possible, there is some fluctuation and lot of loop. The quality of the image isn't perfect eihter, but we don't have any expensive editing software and we do not download those illegally. The pics are taken on my Canon EOS 450D. A System camera isn't the most common tool on stop-motion videos, but it was the best one available. Just in case you wanted to know.

 This video was done for Finnish LUG Palikkatakomo's annual video contest. The subject was Voyage to Uncharted. We did it as a music video of Eläkeläiset's song for several reasons. Firstly, humppa is the best music genre ever. Secondly, we had got some requests for stop-motion humppa animations after our MOCs and we had the props ready. Thirdly there was a humppa song which lyrics were perfect for the contest's subject. You likely have no idea what they are singing, but it's about orienteering trip of demented old man who forgot the map, have no idea what the compass is, has a fragment in his skull and who broke his glasses. It's a cover of Finnish metal group Nightwish's Nemo. You can listen the full song here.

-Pate-keetongu, Vuhvelituotanto

MOC: Big Daddy

 Say hello to Big Daddy from Bioshock game series. This big stubby diving suit fellow was quite an interesting build and one of the challenging MOCs I have ever built.


Okay, lets tell the facts. I have never played any of the Bioshock games. Actually, I have never bought a computer game. I'm not really a gamer guy, expect I used to play Pokemon Emerald and some Mario classics on my Game Boy Micro, and I enjoy brilliant Super Smash Bros. Brawl matches with my friend every now and then. But Big Daddy is a magnificent concept that fulfills all the requirements of coolness: Old scuba suit feel, big drill hand, stubby hunchback look and steampunk feel.

So, I began building this guy. I intended to use some Bionicle pieces as I did with Samus Aran, another game character MOC, but the barnicle parts weren't that good after all. I ended up with Exo-Force styled limbs, legs with click-thing-joints for more stability and arms with ball joint for better mobility. The joints were very hard make flexible enough without making them unnaturally thin.

 The head was interesting and it was the first part I built. It uses a Big ball piece which is held between the tubes and macaroni bricks. I quite proud of that use. The grid is a bit too big, but I like its shape, and didn't really found other ways to do it.

The colors of this MOC are seriously off. I didn't have bricks in any gold shade to do the golden parts in correct colour, so I did them with two shades of dark grey to make it look a bit torn. The fabric parts are also done with dark greys, as it was the best colour to do them because I have quite lot of it. The yellow eyes and brown shoes and belt hopefully balance the colors well enough.

There is a lot of SNOT in the torso. Okay, there is lot of it everywhere. But I'm happy with the shapes of the torso, the hunchback look and the suture between the head and the upper torso.

The arms were probably easiest parts to build, save the simple canisters on the back. Ball joint are just so much easier to play with than the clicky joints. The drill is a classic Rock Raiders chrome drill, one of the best pieces ever. There is even correct number of movable fingers in the left hand!

More pictures at Brickshelf.

-Pate-keetongu

Merry Christmas!

 Oh, that was an greatly overused phrase. Let's say something more interesting:

Whimsically pleasant Fest of Light!

Enjoyable and delightful party of pine trees!

May the surprisingly big number of rattling presents be with you!

That's a lot better, isn't it? That little MOC was built to Finnish LUG Palikkatakomo's Mid-sized (16x16) winter contest and also for Christmas purposes. Father Christmas here is a bit different from LEGO's CMF fig. That one was too American to me. We all know that the old man is the mighty leader of the Elf Republic of Korvatunturi (The Ear Fell), not the fat red guy who drives Coca-Cola trucks around the plastic landscape.

Have nice season time with your friends and family, everyone.

-Pate-keetongu