When Jones “forgets” the oars, the captain is in for a big surprise. It seems maybe his wife is tired of getting splinters from that peg leg…

When I got the set home, I couldn’t help but build it before integrating the pieces into my greater collection. This is something I rarely do, as at this point, I buy lego for the parts or minifigs usually. It has to be a pretty interesting set for me to sit down and build it. I found the build pretty fun. The masts of the ship sit on clicking turn tables, so you adjust them during game play. When your done, the ship also has one of Lego’s newer style flick canons. It uses the springy piece that you put little Lego soccer players on to be able to kick the ball. I do wonder about the over use of this flick canon though. Back when the pirate sets were around, I acrued a rather good amount of canons, that looked like canons. Now I know, you historians will say that knights didn’t have canons until near the very end. Well, the jury is out still about them riding armored dragons too… But what I’m getting at though, is that the ship could have had a more realistic balista or something. Maybe this is what they were going for, and too many years of writing code has destroyed my imagination? Anyway, I still had a lot of fun building it, and it went together quickly.

If your looking for a long build, this might upset you. But where I was looking at the set as a quick pick up for all my armies and an extra ship, I was ok with it. Of course, I also had a little help building, so that might have had something to do with it…

(more after the photos)

As I’ve mentioned, it was a quick build. Almost anyone used to putt ing together sets would find it an easy build… I did however, notice that the colors were off in the manual from the colors of the bricks. Normally not a big deal, but at times they were way off. This is one of the reasons I dislike mega blocks. If your buying it for the set, the colors have been so off it’s hard to tell which one you are supposed to use, especially if your building something predominantly black and grays. The only other draw back, which is much of one, is that the ship hull is a new brown. Not the same as the Viking ship hull, which was not the same as the old Pirate ship hulls. So mixing and matching may look a little weird. Where I plan to make a much larger version of a trol l warrior transport, it may work. Since we wouldn’t expect the trolls to have shiny fancy looking ships. In fact, I would have expected this ship to look a little more hodge podge, a little like, Reavers maybe?

None of this though would deter me from buying this set. Its a great addition to the collection. Its a quick pick up in so many ways of army building you can’t skip it. The play looks like it would be great as well. With firing missiles, spinning  masts, so many minifigs, and details to the ship, its a well rounded set.

Proof

So lets think back to what brought this blog to life. . .

Oh thats right, those damn raccoons. They’re still around, in fact I had great fun, ehr, I mean I was left no other option, then to shoot one a couple weeks ago with my paintball gun while I had the electric fence repurposed on the garden for the summer.

But of course, I wouldn’t be here with such an audience if it wasn’t for my peeps. Those folks that both read my insane ramblings, and those that link to my blog. So since I can’t thank every single one of you by name, I’ll be certain to report out what WordPress tells me are the good folks linking to my site.

Thanks!

• Notes to Marquis
• Wii Sixty: File under – Suck it Sony
• Strong Kids, Safe Kids
• Moldy Snack
• mandymag.com
• Users Suck!
• spiralbound.net

The setup was fairly straight forward, but required some dialing in. I have a D40 and an SB-600 flash. So in order to fire the flash off camera, I either need to use my SC-29 which is similar to Adorama Off-Camera iTTL Coiled Flash Cord (3-Ft Max) for Nikon Cameras. For this setup though, I went with my slave trigger that fires when it detects another flash firing. I was able to put this on a short tripod off to the side behind the fog machine.

I used the flash compensation on my camera’s built in flash to lower how much it fired. I brought it down to -3 and set my SB-600 to manual, 1/32. Then by adding a red gel from a Halloween strobe over the front of the flash, I was able to get a good balance of white flash on camera and red fog back lighting.

Go to flickr for the annotated setup by clicking on the photo.

Build a skeleton head with monical and comb over! Watch out for boogers!

Help SpongeBob destroy Bikini Bottom with his death cruiser! With 5 missiles and 6 canons, Squidworth’s crappy clarinet playing stands no chance!

Uh-oh, here comes Squidworth in his loser cruiser! Don’t let him put a damper on all the fun this Lego set has to offer!

Lego Set 3827, SpongeBob Squarepants.

While on vacation, I finally had a chance to do a little project I had been planning for a while. A few months ago I got the UCS Lego Batmobile (Set 7784) for about a third of msrp. I had also been playing with Nikon Camera Control for a little while and had been trying to think of a cool time-lapse project. I decided to bring the set with me in the event of a day on vacation that we decided to just take it easy, and sure enough one of those came along. The result is below, though it looks like google video made the images a bit crummy.

For anyone that hasn’t done this type of thing before, it’s pretty simple, at least at this amateur hour level of quality. You’ll need some way of controlling the camera. This could be done manually, or in my case I used Nikon Camera Control Pro Software for Windows and Mac. Camera control Pro allows you to control several aspects of your camera. One of which is a time-lapse feature where you specify how frequently to take the picture, and what to do with it, including download it directly to your computer to avoid filling your memory card.

You’ll also need a tripod. I set mine up so it looked down at the table roughly at a 45 degree angle. This gave me a trapezoidal view of my building area. I marked my boundaries with masking tape, which mostly matched the color of the table. This way I knew what would be captured and what would not. Important for keeping the bottle of beer off screen as you work. ;-) Finally, when the capture process was complete, I batch resized my images (while preserving the originals) with Adobe Fireworks to a size more appropriate for DV video size (720×480) then imported the files to Adobe Premiere as an ordered sequence. Finally export your movie and thats it!

If you don’t have Premiere, you could use either Windows Movie Maker, or iMovie depending on your platform. Sorry Linux Folks, don’t know what you have available, but I bet there’s lots of it.

The process was smooth, and a great proof of concept of doing time lapse. I did find however it is a power consuming process. Over the 2-3 hour process of shooting a frame every 2 minutes I drained a mostly filled battery. Which means, to do a full day project you would need the AC adapter for your camera.

As for the build, it was fun! The Batmobile was very cool. A lot of neat details, the one thing I was upset about was the lack of steering. The front wheels drive the gears that simulate an engine, while the steering wheel raises and lowers the front armor over the turbine intakes. There were also a lot of great parts in the set. Lots of roof pieces and wedges that could be used in castles or other vehicles. For now it’s still one of the few assembled sets in my house. We’ll see how long it stays together. To have lasted this long is a feat for sure.