Vesa Lehtimäki, also known as Avanaut on Flickr, has been designing LEGO scenes for many years, recreating worlds like Hoth and Tattooine from Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth, and the 1930s earth from Indiana Jones. revealed that Vesa’s work was one of the big inspirations for the creators of the LEGO Movie, and we invite you to see what it takes in Avanaut’s LEGO set. We also highly recommend you check out some of his other work with action figures as well as his Star Wars Scale Model Project. Photos from the masquerade festival in Venice, Italy, featuring the extravagant outfits and masks of revelers. Venetians have celebrated the traditional event annually since its […] There is a moment when time appears to stop. It’s at that instant, when we are waiting for someone or something, that our thoughts take […] Blocks Magazine: The LEGO Batman Movie Cover One again I've had the privilege to work on another Blocks Magazine issue. This time for The LEGO Batman Movie!
Here's the cover I shot for the February 2017 issue (out now) where inside you'll find a featured Batcave MOC built by Daniel Konstanski for the magazine and also photographed by me. Hope you all like it and check out the issue! As many other LUGs were, ToroLUG was invited to do some displays at The LEGO Movie premiere (and in our case, APPEAR ON TV!). I thought it would be awesome to build my own version of one of the movie posters. It was a super fun build, though slightly stressful, as I didn't have a ton of time to put it together, and managing the weight of the logo was far from easy. The crane still tilts a fair amount. I'd also like to make some improvements when I get this back (currently on display at a movie theater, then off to a LEGO Store). I tried taking this with a backdrop, but just wasn't working out. Plus, I think it kinda works to have this displayed in my 'construction zone'. You can also vote for me to be Fan of the Week on Facebook here: LINK UPDATE: Not only was I tweeted by The LEGO Movie Twitter account, I also just became Fan of the Week on Facebook!
The story starts off predictably enough for a grandiose adventure: a wizard, a prophecy, an unwitting hero. Emmet is just a model construction worker, living his city life to the tee by following every rule in the book. He is manically happy just to be doing it right: greeting his alarm clock with a smile, doing some calisthenics, watching his favorite sitcom before heading out for an overpriced coffee and a fulfilling day on the job. He feels like he has friends, that he’s part of something. Then a mysterious woman who’s obviously not playing by the rules leads him to fall down an archaeological rabbit hole and end up with a mysterious plastic piece stuck to his back. The woman tells him he has found the “piece of resistance” and is the hero of prophecy. And like Neo in The Matrix, Emmet begins to realize he’s been living a lie. The putative villain in the film is Lord Business, head of the Octan corporation. In real life, Fox News, though generally not known for its perceptiveness, accused The Lego Movie of pushing an anti-capitalist agenda and making Lord Business look like Mitt Romney.
To be fair, there is certain capitalist critique in the film: the Octan corporation not only employs Emmet but makes and sells his coffee, produces his television show, and constantly plays his favorite song on the radio. They also manufacture voting machines, which may explain why Lord Business is president of the world. To be fair, Lord Business’s plan to perfect everything to his liking and then glue it in place forever does reflect a certain degree of conservatism. But never mind that The Lego Movie endlessly promotes the toys of a company that made nearly $1 billion in profits in 2012; the real reason the film is not anti-business is because Lord Business does not end up a villain. Nor does Emmet end up a hero—until he realizes he was never entitled to be one. The wizard from the beginning of the film admits he made up the whole prophecy, just so someday someone might believe in him or herself. To help foil Lord Business’s superglue spree, the people of the city are inspired to believe in themselves as well, and they take to the sky in a hodgepodge of jury-rigged vehicles to fight the robotic micromanagers determined to pose everyone perfectly.
The message of the film changes: from there shall be a hero, to anyone can be a hero, to everyone can be a hero. Emmet even offers heroism to Lord Business, saying that he has a choice, that he can change. For exposing both prophecy and villainy as BS, The Lego Movie gets an A+ in the moral-of-the-story department. Of course, there’s a twist: Emmet and his world are the projected fantasies of a real boy, who personifies his real father as Lord Business. When Emmet tumbles out of his animated world onto a live-action concrete floor, he’s no longer able to move. He finds himself in a basement where the boy has spent the day messing with his father’s meticulously constructed collection, ignoring signs to keep his hands off. The lighting is somehow reminiscent of a twenty-five-year-old print ad, and for a moment you get the unsettling feeling that you just spent twelve dollars to watch a 100 minute commercial. But then in walks Will Ferrell. As the boy’s father, a mature collector and block aficionado, Ferrell’s plan to glue everything in place is real.
But the inventiveness of his son inspires him to change his mind. The film represents something of a full circle for Lego, which prior to 1999 issued sets mostly based on its own generic intellectual properties: cities, castles, pirate ships, the wild west. But then they started licensing Batman, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and other blockbuster film franchises. The popularity of Legos soared, to the point where they now have a film franchise of their own. It helps a lot that characters like Batman, Superman, Gandalf, Dumbledore, Milhouse (from The Simpsons), a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and a Millennium Falcon‘s worth of Star Wars characters can drop in for cameos, along with half-forgotten real-life luminaries likes Shakespeare and Shaquille O’Neal. If I have any criticism of the film, it’s that Shaq is one of the few diverse figures in a sea of yellow faces. There’s also Morgan Freeman providing the voice of the wizard, and a Native American in a headdress, whose unprovoked toss of a tomahawk in the general direction of the good guys is all the more troubling for its tired half-heartedness.