I went out of my way to build some things today. For once, I'm dealing with system, and half of my "building" was also sorting the parts. I have a couple of projects that I wanted to work on. Three of them are mostly finished, although some tweaking is in order. I'm working to get some better photos of them, but I have a few WIP shots, so I might as well post those. And regardless, these will probably be at BrickFair, if I go or not. (If I don't go, then I'll just send them in)

Battle of Helm's Deep: Legolas Surfing Down the Steps

Easy one of the best moments in the whole battle sequence. I wanted to recreate it in Lego, using my two elf figs. (I got a second one recently) The bulk of the design process was in finding a way to create the stares... and I thought the pieces I used made it work well enough. The rest was just stacking up my supply of light grey bricks until I had some form of a wall to go behind the steps. And then I put in some characters. The men and elves were easy enough, but I had to be creative with my dwarf and orc, since I don't have any of those figs. (And I would like to buy some, but they're expensive!)

This is mostly finalized. I did add another layer of bricks to increase the height of the wall, since the pictured version seems kinda low (especially if a character wants to walk underneath the archway). Also, if at some point I can acquire an orc or dwarf fig, those will replace the ones in the current pict. But the surfing elf is going to stay.

King Kong

As soon as I saw that the Gorilla suit guy was being released, I knew this scene had to happen. And I have seen some people already use this idea and put their Gorilla Suit guy on their Empire State Building model. But now it's my turn. Since I don't have the official model, I had to design my own. And then I added a biplane to attack him. I have been told that the proportions are off, and yes they are, but I don't feel like changing them, and they work well enough.

Of course, there's a lot to improve on the pictured image, and I've already done that. I tried to reconstruct the tower to look more like a skyscraper and less like a tan rocket. I took the wedges on the sides and used them to expand the base out front, giving it some more depth. The plane has also been improved slightly, mostly because I found the piece that I didn't have when I took this first pict. Additionally, I included a police car at the base in the same scale as the plane. And to really make the scene, I included a camera man, making this model a movie set rather than a movie scene.

... okay, yeah, I need to take a picture of the finished model, but this one here gives you the basic idea.

Warehouse 13: Dark Vault and Gooery

Sorry, this one has no picture yet. Anyway, I created some WH13 figs for BrickCon, but the Warehouse scene I created was cluttered and not too appealing. This time, I put more effort into the scene instead of the characters. It's a two level vignette featuring two scenes from the season one episode "Breakdown"... basically, the Dark Vault (on top) and the gooery. The gooery is fairly basic; I attached a few gears to the walls (and they all move together) but then I used the yellow tube from Meltdown to clog it up... remaking the silly string incident from the episode. The top layer is split by a wall and doorway. On one end, there's the door to the vault (with the Ninjago Skull stickers on it) and a handful of dodgeballs bouncing around to pummel the next person who walks by. On the inside of the Dark Vault are the creepiest artifacts that I could get together, including the Alice mirror. I've placed my Pete, Myka, and Claudia figs in various places on the model.

My original design for this had a lot of space around it, which let me put in more artifacts but which also make the model unstable and top heavy. So I shrunk it down to be on a 8x16 base and about 10 bricks tall. It's a little cramped now... but that kinda works for the scenes. And I tried to take pictures... but they didn't turn out, so until next time.

I'm also considering making the Escher vault from the Season 2 premier. It would incorporate the Artie, McPherson, and HGWells figs I made, and would have all sorts of crazy stairways and such. BUT I don't quite have a solid design down, and I don't think I have enough good bricks to successfully pull it off. But BrickFair isn't for another... many months, so there's still time to work on this, and come up with new projects!

Okay, that's the end of my MOCing ramblings.