PBS documentary on LEGO artists

In their latest episode the PBS series, Off Book features LEGO art and 3 very different brick artists who are using LEGO bricks as a medium to express their art.  Their names should be familiar to you: Sean Kenney, Alex Kobbs, and Nathan Sawaya. Enjoy the short clip. 🙂

LEGO blocks are one of the most beloved toys in the world, playing a role in many a person’s childhood. But for some creators, LEGO has evolved from toy to art form. In this episode, we talk to three LEGO artists who have made beautiful mosaics, amazing stop-motion videos, thoughtful sculptures, and have turned these tiny building blocks into a true artistic medium.

Featuring:
Sean Kenney
Alex Kobbs
Nathan Sawaya

Music by:
Pixelord – http://soundcloud.com/pixelord
Project Divinity – http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/2741/project-divinity
Da Robotz – http://soundcloud.com/da-robotz
Yusuke Tsutsumi – http://soundcloud.com/yusuke-tsutsumi
Tryad – http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/104/tryad

Produced by Kornhaber Brown: http://www.kornhaberbrown.com

LEGO movie plot revealed

MTV News interviews the directors/writers behind the upcoming LEGO movie and reveals the movie plot.  Phil Lord and Chris Miller notes that: “We’re in the middle of heavy pre-production on the film,” Lord said. “We’re doing character design, we’re writing and boarding and coming up with animatics. There’ll be some casting stuff hopefully soon. The movie is really weird in a great way. It’s crazy.” According to MTV News, Lord said that some of the film will take place in a live action landscape, but the majority of the movie takes place in a “one-inch high universe” with “a cast of thousands and thousands and thousands.”

“It is the story of basically a young man who doesn’t have a creative bone in his body and has to always build things from the instructions. He’s an ‘instructions worker.’ In the Lego city, they build buildings, and it turns out in this universe it’s illegal to build apart from the instructions,” Lord said. “So what he finds out is that he’s actually descendant from these like super creative Jedi-type people who are called ‘Master Builders’ and he has been charged with saving the universe from being frozen together by an evil bad guy, so over the course of the movie he has to unlearn all of that lame-o, uncreative stuff and learn how to build without all of the instructions in order to save the universe.”

Hmm… does sound suspiciously like thousand of fantasy books and the archetypal hero story.  But if that would inspire kids to build without instructions, then it sounds good to me.  You can watch the actual interview clip HERE.

Melancholic Astronaut Man by Allie Moss

Can you identify the sets used in this video?

You can also find out more about Allie (the singer/songwriter) on her website.

Via USA Today

Google’s link to LEGO goes way back…

… back all the way to the “first Google server, created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were graduate students at Stanford’s School of Engineering in the 1990s“.

This server is now at the Huang Engineering Center, in the Stanford School of Engineering.  The picture below speaks for itself. 

The only quibble I have with the server is why Duplo??? 😛

You can read more about this server from Physorg.com.

UPDATE: Oh my gosh, Akunthita confirmed those are not Duplo but some clone bricks! The Google founders! Oh my, speechless…

LEGO Exhibit & Sale by Singapore AFOL

I was flipping thru the papers looking for sales (erm, to plan where to shop over the weekend, haha), and came across this newspaper article in the Life! section of The Straits Times, the local newspaper.  So if you are an AFOL in Singapore and planning what to do over the weekend, you can consider to pop by the John Erdos Art gallery @ Dempsey Road.

Where: John Erdos Art, 6B Dempsey Road
When: Till 15th May, daily from 10am till 6pm
Admission: Free
Info: Call 6735 5130

If you want to read the article, do pop by the John Erdo’s website that has a scanned copy of the newspaper article from the Straits Times.

2011 Oscar Best Picture Nominations: LEGO version

Came across the LEGO version of movie posters for the 2011 Oscars Best Picture nominees (or more formally known as the 83rd Academy Awards) that piqued my interest so I set about looking for the original movie posters to do a comparison. 

The verdict? Mostly fairly accurate, with one or two exceptions where I couldn’t find a movie poster version (since there are so many versions!) that matched the LEGO version. 

If you are interested, I think you can get the posters from Old Red Jalopy tho to be honest, I couldn’t find the posters on the website when I looked.

Enjoy! 😀

Black Swan

The Fighter

Inception

The Kids Are All Right

The King’s Speech

127 Hours

The Social Network

Toy Story 3

True Grit

Winter’s Bone

Source:  LEGO Posters by Old Red Jalopy Via The Next Movie 



Some LEGO News Round-Up

Just thought to do a summary of stuff I’ve gathered from the internet… I’ve been busy all week at work, so didn’t feel like blogging individual posts after reading them. 

• Obama used to play with LEGO as a kid.  As he described: “I used to build some pretty mean LEGO towers when I was a kid”.  You can read more from CNN’s blog here.
• Baby can wear LEGO shoes even if he/she is too young to play with LEGO.  Babygadget reports on the Lego^TM-inspired Kickers shoes project.
• You can watch the LEGO Battles: Ninjago for Nintendo DS – Trailer from BSCkids, who has also reported on the new Nintendo 3DS Game – LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean
• PR Newswire reports on how well TLG is doing in this press release: LEGO Systems Records Over $1.0BN in 2010 U.S. Consumer Sales 
• I also liked the stop motion video that shows GeekDad building The LEGO Tower Bridge
• And of course we can count on Grogall to bring us the latest hi-res pics of new sets, this time for Cars 2 and Alien Conquest’s UFO Abduction sets.  You can find the pics on Brickset for the Cars 2 sets and on EB’s Alien Conquest thread for the UFO Abduction set.

In case you are curious where I get those info/stuff I’ve been blogging about, I actually Google for news related to LEGO.  Out of 20-30 hits, maybe one or two would be considered ‘bloggable’ by me.  But then whether I blog about it immediately or not still depends on how I feel that day, or sometimes I’ll keep them aside as ‘back-up’ posts for quiet news days and days when I’m too busy to write.  

And of course now and then I feel bad about being deliquent and go back to do a summary like what I am doing now. 😛

I also visit various forums (well, mostly EB for the latest news, and I always click on the threads if I happen to see Grogall do a posting, haha), and as you can see from the RSS feeds on the right, there are various sites that I visit/read.  Quite a lot of ‘work’ huh?

What do you think?  Are there stuff I’ve summarised today that you would like me to post immediately?  Give me some feedback k?