Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament: Gideon!
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.build.ancient
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Date:
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Thu, 21 Apr 2005 21:05:02 GMT
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Viewed:
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6149 times
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In lugnet.build.ancient, Bruce Hietbrink wrote:
Thanks, Bruce.
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God Uses Midianites to Oppress Israel - The coolest pic in this story is the
second one. The Jack Stone columns behind the inverted arches makes an
interesting wall, and the mosaic floor is very cool.
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I’m not sure why I got wrapped up in creating mosaic patterns out of headlight
bricks before trying the simpler idea of creating them out of regular ol’ bricks
and plates. I guess the headlight mosaics have the nice advantage of providing
a stud-free surface and therefore look more polished. But now I’ve tried making
a few floor patterns with 1x1 plates, and they’re cool too. I have a few floors
and other interesting architectural elements just waiting for a story to use
them in. :)
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In the first pic, the couple in the back left are particularly well
posed--it really looks like he’s whispering something to her.
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It’s always nice when that sort of thing works. There’s only so much you can do
with the minifig’s limited posability and a set number of facial expressions.
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Gideon Demands a Sign - I like the tool you’ve created out of an ice-axe and
bar. Of course it is of limited poseability--perhaps if they were connected
by a lightsaber hilt?
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Ah yes, a gray lightsaber hilt might have worked out. I tried using a few other
pieces as connectors, but they didn’t look very good. Then I decided I could
get away with just using Gideon’s hand as the connector.
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The flame effect works really well. Why is Gideon standing on the
rock at the end?
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I still can’t believe that the LEGO flame piece was around for years without
anyone realizing that you can interlock them using the little nubs at the base.
It does allow for some very cool raging fire effects.
Why is Gideon standing on the rock? Partly it’s just because I wanted him to be
leaning forward with his hand on his brow, agonizing that he’s going to die now
that he’s laid eyes on the angel of Yahweh, and thought that a nice angle for
this would be to have the giant oak tree in the background, and to make the shot
work, I had to raise him up a little by putting him on the rock. The other
thing in my mind was that Gideon climbed up on the rock to examine the area
where his offering had just burst into flames and vanished. But since you can’t
tell he’s standing on the rock in the “agonizing” photo, I guess it does seem a
little strange for him to be standing on it in the next photo. Then again, I
think Gideon just likes standing up there on that rock as he does in later
stories. :)
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Gideon Commits Vandalism - What is the angled piece to the right of Gideon’s
bed in the first two pics?
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That’s a coffin standing upright (though upside down). I inserted some brown
tiles as shelves to make the whole thing look like a funky bookshelf, but in the
photos I ended up choosing, you don’t get all that great a view of it.
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The altar to Baal is very cool--good use of the headlights. I
probably mentioned this before, but the Ashera pole design is
also very good.
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Thanks. With the Asherah, there do seem to be some good indications of what an
Asherah pole looked like--at least that it was likely carved out of a tree. The
cupping-own-breasts design is based on smaller Asherah statuettes that
archaeologists have unearthed throughout Palestine from Biblical times. There
are some ideas about how Baal was represented, although there seems to be a good
deal of variation. As for altars to Baal, I was on my own for that one.
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Gideon Demands More Signs - Good solutions for the fleece and the dew.
Gideon squeezing out the water into the bowl is particularly effective. I
had to laugh at God with the watering can.
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I was happy to have the oversized watering can make it’s
second
appearance in The Brick Testament. :)
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120,000 Midianites Killed - In 7:8,17-18, are the tents in the background
just black capes? Nice effect.
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Yes, in that first longshot of the Midianite camp, those are black capes propped
up on black antennas except for the very back row which are black octagonal cone
pieces. For the close-up shots of the camp, I used the much larger black cloth
tents held up with jousting poles.
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The field of corpses in 8:10 is very effective (is that verse right?
it’s out of order).
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Thanks. It’s pretty hard to illustrate 120,000 slain corpses in one shot, but I
did want to capture something of the magnitude of the horror of it. There are a
lot of minifigs in that shot, but he blurry little microscale Midianite corpses
in the background are just black arm pieces with yellow hands.
The chapter and verse number is correct. In the original telling, the number of
Midianites killed at this part of the story is not revealed until later when
Gideon is attacking the remnant army of 15,000 at Karkor. But it seemed like it
would be more jarring to illustrate the 120,000 dead Midianites at that point in
the story, so I moved it earlier for clarity’s sake.
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Interesting tower in 8:8--I’d like to see better pictures of that.
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Here’s some:
I almost used a vertical shot (like the fourth photo above) here just to show
off more of the tower, but I like the horizontal one I went with just marginally
better.
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The best pic in this story, though, is 8:10-11 with the
Israelites leaping down on the Midianite army. I assume
the horizontal legs on those leaping figs are stuck
onto hidden headlight bricks?
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I was thinking that for a band of 300 soldiers to rout an army of 15,000, they’d
really have to take them by surprise (or have Yahweh doing all the hard work,
but the text doesn’t state that explicitly here). You are correct about the
leaping figs being attached with hidden supports using headlight bricks.
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Gideon Slaughters His Own People - In 8:17, how did you do the stream of
blood from the upper left figure? Is that just trans-red 1x1 tiles stacked
against eachother leaning up against the wall? If so, how many times did
that fall down during photography? :)
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I got lucky with that one. They are indeed just stacked and leaning against the
wall, and that it is the last element I added to that scene, so the slightest
jostle probably would have collapsed it, but I was somehow able to stack them
and get in the photos before they toppled.
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Gideon and His Sons - I really like the action shot with the spurting heads
(hmm, not sure what that says about me) - very “Kill Bill”-esque.
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As I’ve said before, there’s so very much violent death in the Bible, it’s a a
real challenge to keep it from becoming sort of ho-hum when you’re illustrating
the 977th massacre or execution, so I am forced to come up with ways to keep it
visually interesting (while still plausible) and still produce a visceral
reaction in the viewer. I think when people read the Bible, you very quickly
become numb to all the violence. You can read a passage about the slaughter of
men, women, and children and barely give it a second thought. It becomes as
mundane as the endeless lists of begats.
Anyhow yes, there’s a little influence of Kill Bill in the geysers of blood
shooting up from the necks of the still-standing bodies. Before I got the idea
to use the red lightsabers, my first attempt at the scene used trans-red
cylinders and cones for the blood, I had the severed heads already on the
ground, and Gideon was alreay turned and walking away:
But that seemed like a long time for those bodies to still be standing upright.
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The huge pool of blood in the next pic is also quite effective.
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When is a huge pool of LEGO blood ever not effective? ;)
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In 8:26, why use 1x1 yellow round plates rather than gold coins?
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I considered gold coins, but decided I didn’t want the “golden” earrings to be a
different color than the resulting golden ephod. (Admittedly I did do that
back in Exodus for the golden calf, but at least there was a shot of Aaron melting down
the gold and thus having their color from shiny gold to just yellow.)
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I’ll second Marc’s question on the ephod design.
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(See my reply to Marc on that issue.)
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In the last pic, what is the source of Gideon’s wife’s head?
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It’s Alexis
Sinister from the Dino Island adventurer sets. I removed her bangs and (for
lack of a better term) “sideburns” so the head would be compatible with hair
pieces in colors other than just black.
Thanks for the comments as always, Bruce.
-Brendan
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: The Brick Testament: Gideon!
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| Hey Brendan, Great work as usual. God Uses Midianites to Oppress Israel - The coolest pic in this story is the second one. The Jack Stone columns behind the inverted arches makes an interesting wall, and the mosaic floor is very cool. In the first (...) (20 years ago, 21-Apr-05, to lugnet.build.ancient, FTX)
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