Incomplete Gamer

By now you know the drill.  Inspired by James May’s Toy Stories, Incomplete Gamer Junior has been tackling various projects using the toys and hobbies featured in the TV Show.

With two Toy Stories Challenges under his belt, and the end of the School Holidays looming, Incomplete Gamer Junior turned his attention to Denmark’s most famous export, the Lego brick. Make the jump to see how Incomplete Gamer Junior fares with Toy Stories Challenge #3.

Unlike the Plasticine Challenge, and the Meccano project, Incomplete Gamer Junior has been building and rebuilding Lego models since he was old enough to know not to swallow the bricks, so simply building a Lego house was going to present two main problems.   Firstly, a distinct lack of challenge. Incomplete Gamer Junior can build a Lego house in his sleep.  Sure it’s ugly and it’s not going to win any architectural engineering prizes, but it’s dead easy.  The second problem we encounter when we try to overcome the first problem – to make the project a lot more challenging.  We can attempt to recreate James May’s full scale Lego house, or even just to attempt a scaled down replica, but unfortunately that would take an investment in Lego bricks that Incomplete Gamer just can’t afford…sure we have a ‘donate now’ button, but that doesn’t mean anyone is actually pressing it.

So the decision is made to break the challenge into two parts.  Part one involves the aforementioned lame Lego house.

Here’s Incomplete Gamer Junior: I’ve had a lot of experience with Lego in my life.  I just love the plastic bricks.  Sadly this part of my life is coming to an end as I’m entering into my teenage years.  The last time I played with Lego was about four years ago, which in kid years is a lifetime! Because it’s been such a long time I was really happy to spend time pushing Lego bricks together.  I think it would have been incredibly difficult to build a full scale Lego house simply because of the number of bricks needed to build it.  It took me a little over twenty minutes to make a simple roofless house.

The second part is more in keeping with the Incomplete Gamer website and involves an attempt to recreate a well known video game scene out of Lego bricks and to capture a convincing photographic image that looks as similar as possible.

If you’ve seen the header image we’re hoping you’ve guessed correctly that the image we’re trying to recreate is taken from the opening sequence of Uncharted 2, with Drake hanging off the end of a railway carriage hanging perilously over the edge of a rocky Himalayan cliff.  Our first attempt (above)  was staged hanging a converted ‘Harry Potter’ railway carriage over the edge of a chocolate covered sofa, but photoshopping a mountain backdrop proved too challenging.

Attempt number two involved photographing the trains in front of the laptop screen displaying the image (below), however the background failed to show clearly in the photograph.

Not to be discouraged, Incomplete Gamer Junior printed out the photograph, and placed it on the wall, and  placed the train, carriages and ‘Drake’ into the foreground.

Finally satisfied with the resulting photo, Incomplete Gamer Junior added some snow to the photo and turned it into a black and white photo.

How did he do?  Clearly there are enough ‘spot the difference’ differences to keep you busy for some time, but I think the Incomplete Gamer Junior captured the essence of the scene.  Let me know what you think.

Want to build your own Lego house or watch the James May Toy Stories television series? Just hit up the links below.

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