After I returned home, I built this LEGO MOC (my own creation) of the Weezer stage. At that point, I only had some Star Wars LEGO sets, so I had to pick up some additional bricks and minifigures to create this model. Notably, I purchased the cheapest Harry Potter set (for the bespectacled Rivers Cuomo) and a large brick assortment set for the stage base and back.
I based the stage arrangement on Weezer’s stage design at the Key Arena performance. They had a backdrop covered with equally distant squares. Lights behind the black squares illuminated and played lights on the backdrop. In front of the stage back was a large stylized “W” that descended from above when the band began playing.
For the backdrop lights, I used battery-powered Christmas lights.
For the stylized “W,” I cut it out from card stock.
Also, I used card sock to cut out guitar and bass shapes that I taped to rods that the minifigures held.
Apologies for the quality of the photos. I took the photos with my second digital camera. The first was a Sony Mavica with 3.5″ floppy disk. I sold it and purchased a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-P3 (I think). I’m lucky to have these photos as I think I took them more to experiment with the camera than to memorialize the LEGO model!
While Rogue One (2016) comes in second to my love of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the former film is more real in terms of foregrounding real people who want to fight back against the oppression of the Empire at all costs. The characters realize the stakes are high, but they fight on anyways. There is minimal space wizardry and instead people working together to support each other in the face of overwhelming odds.
Rogue One also signaled an inclusive-focused shift in Star Wars storytelling–a long needed correction to the franchise. Hopefully this trend will continue both in front of and behind the camera. And, with the new Andor (2022-) series, this corner of the Star Wars universe has new stories unfolding.
While Rogue One is far from perfect, it does a lot of things perfectly. One aspect of its perfection that’s important to me are its merchandising with LEGO. It had a large number of sets, which LEGO mercilessly divided main character minifigures between (as it did for The Hobbit, too). Nevertheless, the overall design of the U-Wing Fighter, Krennic’s Imperial Shuttle, Battle on Scarif (above), and AT-ST (which I currently have on my desk). These sets tied into the imaginative world of the film quite well and I certainly enjoyed building them.
I started with these photos that I had taken in 2015:
On the left is a photo that I took of the Ghostbusters LEGO 21108 set on my desk at City Tech. All of the elements that I needed are here, but I realized that I would have to break it down into parts to create the composite image–ghost, Ecto-1, Ray, Ego, Peter, and Winston. On the right above is a photo that I took of the Hook and Ladder Company 8 building in Manhattan. Due to the time of day that the photo was taken, the front of the building is in shadow and there are sightseers in front of the firetruck door that need to be removed.
I setup my work document in GIMP in the following way.
First, I pasted the hook and ladder photo as the bottom-most layer. I adjusted the colors and reduced the shadows to help the firehouse pop in the center of the photo. I used the lasso tool (creating irregular shapes instead of squares or circles helps with blending later) and clone tool to copy material over the sightseers in the front of the firehouse and to remove a light reflection on the road surface in front of the pedestrian walking line in the lower left. I smoothed out these fixes with the smudge tool.
Then, I cut out the ghost, Ecto-1, and four Ghostbusters and pasted each into its own independent layer and adjusted colors appropriately. Because the Ghostbusters are obscuring part of Ecto-1 in the original photo, I needed to arrange the composition so that they hid the back of the vehicle. But, I had to use the clone tool to repair some aspects of the car (e.g., the clear 1×1 round studs that had supported the ghost needed to be removed and the white surface of the hood restored), and some of the exterior windows and side panels peeked through gaps between the Ghostbusters (I used the clone tool and lasso tool to create the rear windows and side panels). Also, I wanted to arrange them so that it appeared more like a group shot instead of a line as in the display for the original set. To achieve this, I flipped horizontally Winston and Peter’s images to that they are turned toward Ray and Egon to their right. Unfortunately, this flips their name tags, but maybe no one will notice! Also, I increased their size by 120% to make them appear further away from Ecto-1 and closer to the viewer. I’ll return to the ghost below.
Next, I added a layer between the firehouse image and Ecto-1 (being the lowest layer of the LEGO images). I used the paintbrush with a large brush to paint black “shadow” under Ecto-1 and falling from right to left on each Ghostbuster member. I reduced the opacity of the layer to lighten its appearance so that the shadow wasn’t too harsh.
Finally, I transformed the ghost layer and rotated it to about 60 degrees. I adjusted its colors to give it a neon green hue. I then duplicated the layer. On the lower ghost layer, I applied a linear blur to give it a flowing, streak effect, which I positioned under the ghost to give it implied ethereal movement.
The final product isn’t perfect, but it was fun to make and it helped me learn/reinforce workflow practices in GIMP.
Don’t let perfection hold you back from using tools to make things that bring you joy. Each time you make something, you learn new things and get better at doing the things you’ve learned before. If you have the time, energy, and material, you can always take another stab at the thing you did before to make a better iteration. Though, I recommend starting fresh each time instead of making adjustments to something you’ve already made. The process of building and making from start to finish can yield wildly divergent and better outcomes that can be surprising and unexpected. Tweaking what you’ve already done might yield something interesting, but the constraints of the original project might limit what is ultimately possible.
There are, in my mind, only two actors who are worthy of donning the cowl and cape: Michael Keaton and Christian Bale. Keaton’s Batman performances in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), and most recently in The Flash (2023), holds a special place in heart as how I imagined a hard boiled Batman. Bale’s Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) reclaimed for the character what had been lost in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1998), and Nolan’s trilogy elevated Batman’s narrative providing character development and science fictional plausibility. Keaton and Bale are my favorites for sharing certain elements while also approaching the character in subtly different ways.
Unfortunately, LEGO didn’t make a widely available minifigure-scale Batpod, Batman’s motorcycle escape system from The Tumbler. Instead, they had a competition for VIP members for an extremely limited set, which resulted in what I see as further erosion of what LEGO could be (play) and instantiation of what it is (making money for LEGO and aftermarket resellers).
Thankfully, a LEGO enthusiast designed the MOC below and offered reasonably priced kits with the parts on eBay. I picked one up to go along with my Tumbler. It includes an electromagnetic pulse gun mounted on the rear quarter.
While LEGO had done alright I thought with The Tumbler, they really dropped the ball with their The Dark Knight Rises set, 76001: The Bat vs. Bane: Tumbler Chase. The Bat, Batman’s VTOL aircraft, was cartoonish with the blue accents and lack of detail, and the military Tumbler was anemic. I would like to build a MOC of The Bat that does it justice–perhaps one day . . .
LEGO’s 40334 Avengers Tower was offered as a gift with purchase (GWP) in 2019. For such a small model, it captures the iconic building from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) perfectly. And, it included a mid-transformation Tony Stark/Iron Man minifigure and tiny Quinjet. It is like a little brother to my minifigure-scale Avengers Tower MOC.
