My modular corner cinema

Update again: See my modular town hall (also from 10184) pics here.

Update again: See my modular white building pics here. 🙂

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Update: My cinema has been blogged in Classic-Town! Yippee! Click here to see the post. 😀

I’d also posted in EB about my cinema and after reading all the kind comments, feel so inspired to build some more. 🙂

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Readers would have seen from earlier posts (here for my modular street and here for research) that I’d been fiddling around with a modular corner cinema modified with parts from the Town Plan. 

Well, I finally put in the last 4 pieces (the technic blocks with hole that came with my S@H PAB selection) today and since I’m kinda sick of playing around with the cinema, I thought to take some pics over the long weekend and share here – sorta an official closure. 😛

Front and side views:

First floor interior, front door, ticket booth and popcorn corner:

2nd floor interior, entrance and cinema room:

Back view (really ugly!):

Ok, not perfect… but I’m lazy to fix the flaws. Stuff I’m pleased with are the popcorn corner, ticket counters (I like the TV screens 🙂 ) and Yeti display (like those movie displays at cinemas). 

Stuff I don’t like so much… (wow, such a long list!) Stairs ain’t so great, the screen and chairs look kinda sad and the back is really ugly (luckily not visible in my usual display!).  Plus I don’t have enough white plates for the flooring and roof so it’s really patch-worky looking – the red plates are totally based on whatever plates I have on hand) and the white tiles are leftovers from the winter scene I did last December (I think either blue or red tiles would look more authentic for carpeting).

As a last view, my current modular street:

 

Update: Got the cinema from Town Plan to do a side-by-side comparison with my modular:

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So what’s next? I’m thinking to modularise either the Pizza store from City Corner (7641), or the Police Headquarters (7744) or the Hospital (7892).  What do you think?

Am leaning towards Pizza store, mainly cos I have lots of red bricks on hand from all the basic brick sets I’ve been swiping.  Plus it’s an easy one.  The Police HQ and Hospital will probably have to be a full plate thing rather than the half plate for Pizza store, so those are also gonna take a while to build up.

Decisions, decisions…

My S@H PAB buys

Took advantage of the long weekend to sort my S@H PAB buys (and check that I got everything I ordered – I did).  Some pics to share:

Pre-sorting:

Sorted:

Bagged and ready for storage:

As you can see, mainly supplies for future MOCs like the fabuland lamps, clear panels and lion head. More kids for my lego town, as well as females (head and hair).

Some MOCs that caught my eye…

Just one quick pic of each creation. Do go to the Flickr pages to see more and leave comments/compliments for the creators. 🙂

First a subversive trailer park creation.  Lego town/city creations are usually fairly happy suburban scenes, so it’s quite refreshing to see a trailer house by by Doctor Mobius.  My fav bit is the car on blocks.

Next, a San Francisco cable car by Tom Bricks.  I haven’t been to SF so no idea if it looks authentic but it sure will look good in any table town creation.

Last, we have Dawn Feather Keep by LegoLord.  The lovely lush greenery and a meandering stream caught my eye.

New 2010 Lego catalog

Go get yours if you haven’t already gotten it. Avail at specialty stores and ts in Singapore.

Highlight for me is the Harry Potter pics.  Yeah, saw all the sets online and in high-res but am still thrilled.  Looking forward to getting them in October since I missed a fair bit of HP during my dark ages.

Seen at Toyshunt

Thought it might be interesting for non-Singapore based fans to get a glimpse of one of the local Lego specialty stores.

Just some quick snaps of displays and minifigs and weapons for sale.

Btw Toyshunt is also selling loose green brick separators.

Bob Carney’s Schloß Neuschwanstein

It’s stunning, and it’s huge! And, it’s just one of the many other castles Bob Carney has built. Picture below shows Bob with his wife Judy.

From Classic Castle:

If you attended BrickWorld 2010, or if you’ve looked at photos, you’ve surely been amazed by Bob Carney’s most recent castle, Schloß Neuschwanstein. This project started in January of this year, and was completed just in time to show to other AFOLs in Chicago. Neuschwanstein is not truly from the Castle era, since this was a palace built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the nineteenth century, but it is amazingly beautiful, nestled up against the north face of the Alps in southern Germany. Every fan of the LEGO Castle theme should spend time on his site to see his MOCs, learn about the history behind these castles, and even get plans to build your own.

Dr. Carney is a long-time AFOL, starting when he built LEGO with his kids in the 70’s, and also has a great interest in the medieval era and castle construction. Over the course of four weeks in two trips in 2000 and 2003, he and his wife visited about a hundred castles in Scotland and Ireland. He extensively researches each of his LEGO projects, and has now recreated 128 historic castles in LEGO form. These can all be found on his site, LEGO Castles.

Modular microscale castle system

What can AFOLs who are out of space do?  Apart from building on LDD (which is frankly not as satisfying as playing with the real thing), perhaps one way is to think small i.e. go microscale.

I’ve seen quite a few amazing microscale creations on Flickr, and just came across a modular microscale castle system which I thought is really interesting.

From Classic Castle:

Kecia Christine Hansen is an AFOL from the land of LEGO, Copenhagen, Denmark. Over the past couple of years she has come up with a modular system to build microscale castles. She felt these modules were a perfect fit for the concept of LEGO Design by Me, so with a slight redesign, she has used LEGO Digital Designer to come up with over fifty different units based on 16×16 bases. Defined connection points and the placement of roads and city walls allow these to be brought together in endless configurations to make huge, er, tiny walled cities. You can get the files for twenty-five of her modules by going to the Design by Me gallery and searching on the usename lara34 (I found that you have to actually click the green triangle rather than simply hitting the return key, or else LEGO’s search engine comes up with no matches). You can even then order these modules from LEGO. She’s already bought several and plans to buy more, so she can turn her virtual designs into ABS reality.

In addition to displaying her MOCs in her Brickshelf gallery, Kecia runs Adventurers.dk, a site and forum devoted to the LEGO Adventurers and Indiana Jones themes. She also has a personal site, BrickPortal, which she says is out of date and due for a site redesign, and is a member of Lugnet.