Hillel Cooperman gave an “Ignite” presentation on the adult LEGO community recently. You can see it here on Youtube:
I found this through a post on Facebook by Felix Greco (I don’t think I can link to that because of the way Facebook works). The comments were not entirely positive, mostly around the way he talks about the adult LEGO fans, implying that they are so nerdy that they don’t date. It does sound to me like Hillel is not entirely comfortable with his AFOLishness. If he hadn’t had a kid and a wife who was enthusaistic about Harry Potter LEGO, do you think he would’ve rediscovered LEGO? Somehow I doubt it. However, most of the presentation was pretty positive. I do think he needs to take more pride in LEGO as a hobby and not denigrate his fellow AFOLs. But all in all, it’s a pretty good overview of the LEGO scene, told in an engaging and lively manner.
Last night at BrickFest, the new 10194 Emerald Night train set was officially announced. For the announcement, they played this video on the big screen…
I shot video of the rest of the announcement and will try to get that edited soon!
A photo of one of my creations was (very) briefly featured in this video:
At the very end, when he does the “you can build anything out of bricks” bit, there’s a brief shot of my Coast Guard helicopter. No, I’m not annoyed that they didn’t give credit, I think it’s cool that it was chosen to represent the helicopter genre.
I guess I need to repost the Coast Guard base pictures on Brickpile — it’s currently only posted on my old site (and occasionally appears on BayLUG’s layouts).
The technogeek blog Gizmodo has announced the winners of the Go Miniman Go video contest. There are some really incredible videos in the winners list, and I don’t know if I could pick a favorite. They all show a lot of creativity not just with the LEGO but also the filmmaking. Check it out.
Yesterday, a crew from KTVU channel 2 television came to see the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group exhibit. Watch this Video on KTVU.com about our exhibit at the Museum of American Heritage in Palo Alto. Russell (the club president) and I weren’t there, but Loren did a great job explaining the exhibit for the camera. I’m sure that must have been nerve-wracking but I think he’s got a great voice for that kind of thing so I’m glad he was willing and available to do it.
I heard that it was going to be on the TV today, but I haven’t heard any details about exactly when. Probably on the news or something. But the way that video clip was put together doesn’t really feel like a news segment to me, so maybe not.
I’m not there right now because I’m home sick with a cold, but hopefully I can be there next weekend – which is our final weekend, by the way! So come on out and see it while there’s still time!
This is really a work of art – not just for the clever LEGO creations, but maybe even more so for the filmmaking. The modern classical music accompanies the images very well. By taking a series of close-up video shots of various parts of the contraption, each one well composed and from an interesting angle, our interest is maintained throughout. Exceedingly well-done!
Properly titled “Dragostea din Tei,” this song became an Internet fad a couple of years ago when Gary Brolsma posted his “Numa Numa Dance” video on YouTube. A couple of years ago, I posted on Brickpile about a LEGO animation based on Gary’s video that I had seen on The Brothers Brick. I was going over some old posts on Brickpile and saw that video was not available any longer, but did a quick search for “numa numa lego” on YouTube and found that the video had been reposted, so updated that old blog post.
But in the process of doing that search I also found this:
It was made with the English translation of the song, which I’d never heard before. Sounds strange to my ears, having heard the Romanian version so many times…
The really amazing part is that it’s built using only the parts in the stock NXT kit. Instructions are provided – I’m tempted to make one myself. (Note however that you either need to buy a special color sensor, or modify the colors of your Rubik’s Cube so that white and yellow can be distinguished by the stock light sensor.
