LEGO (16 page)

 

 

The Beach House is the first larger-size model I’ve completed, and although I can appreciate the finished product that I built with my wife, my overarching desire is to build something better, something of my own design. Something that people will focus on instead of a store-bought model. I need a signature style. The great LEGO builders, like great artists, are recognizable in what they build. And most of their inspiration seems to come from the theme they love. The space guys build fantastical transport ships. The castle fans have articulated cliffside dwellings, and the Technic builders are all about intricate machines.

I haven’t fallen in love with a theme, in part because I didn’t build thematically as a child. Well, that, and the fact that LEGO Ninjas lasted only from 1998 to 2000.

“I feel like I need to build something huge that will catch everybody’s attention,” I tell Joe Meno over the phone. He has recently returned from introducing
BrickJournal
to the crowd at Comic-Con in San Diego.

“You don’t need to have a big collection to build well, you just need to use parts in interesting ways and build things you like,” says Joe.

The number of bricks and the scale in which people build will give clues to their style. Minifig scale, in which everything is built around the size of a minifig, is approximately 1:48, and is probably the most common for group displays. Some AFOLs are known for constructions in micro scale—tiny re-creations of buildings and objects. Buildings can be scaled down to a ratio as low as 1:1,250. At LEGOLAND, building models are constructed to a scale of 1:20, meaning the real Empire State Building is twenty times larger than its theme park counterpart. A Miniland USA figure, a man or a woman made of bricks, is eighteen times smaller than the average human.

With a collection of maybe a few thousand LEGO bricks, I think I’m probably more suited to building in micro scale. And the idea of making very small re-creations of large objects reminds me of my favorite store as a child: Think Big in New York City, which made micro and mega versions of everyday objects. Unfortunately, Think Big was a failed retail concept. I still covet the overstuffed baseball glove chair. Micro is a theme unto itself, transcending the space-castle continuum.

When I look through my collection, I see lots of small tires. That is not an accident; LEGO is the largest manufacturer of tires in the world, with 306 million produced per year. It’s why Andreas Stabno will never be able to sell all of the tires in his BrickLink store. A bag of tires at a LEGO convention is a sucker’s buy.

Joe has advised me to look for the most obvious feature of a given model, whether it is Groucho Marx’s glasses or the arch of a Volkswagen Beetle. If you can boil down a building or a car or a sculpture to a series of small, recognizable pieces, then you can create something that is dramatically better than you expected when you start.

The wheels I’m looking at are small, no bigger than my thumb-nail, so I decide to make a series of micro-scale vehicles, just two studs wide. I start with a yellow construction vehicle. Translucent 1 × 2 bricks form the cab, and a yellow 2 × 4 plate serves as the base of the truck. I use only ten pieces total, but it’s my favorite construction I’ve built.

I have a stack of translucent bricks from the Pick A Brick cup I purchased at Brickworld, so I know I’m going to build a line of trucks with the bricks forming the front windshield and windows of the cab. The fun comes from hunting down unique elements to give the impression of what I’m trying to build with just a single piece. A hinged gray 1 × 2 Technic brick (meaning it has holes for pins rather than studs) and a gray spaceship seat become the back of a dump truck. Building one model always seems to inspire the next. In the course of a search, I start pulling elements that suggest the top of a flatbed truck or the shape of a garbage truck. I’m not building in rainbow mode anymore; instead I’m focusing on getting colors to match actual trucks I’ve seen or the pictures I pull up for comparison on the Internet.

After four days of building small trucks, I finally find what I would have wanted to build as a kid: a monorail. The boxy nature of the trucks, when combined with a 1 × 2 element that resembles a toolbox, captures the shape of the coolest kind of train. I also start to think about design elements. The track is just an inverted plate, attached to supports from the Mars Mission set like the kind that I used for my biplane. The plate, studs pointing down, simulates track ties, and the exposed tubes give it a railroad feel. At twelve studs long and two studs wide, this MOC stretches the width of a sticky note.

Dave posts a comment after I put up a picture of the monorail MOC on my blog: “Dude, that MOC is hott. Yeah, you score two ‘t’s’ for the monorail. Nice work on this one. I really dig the use of the ‘toolboxes’ for the front and rear.”

It is the first public compliment I’ve received about something I’ve built, and it feels good. My self-confidence as a LEGO builder is officially tied to responses from the Internet.

Online is also where I can find a lot of ideas for future projects, including a LEGO vignette, typically a small scene constructed on an 8 × 8 baseplate.

“The best vignettes capture a slice of life, and tell a small story in a scene, often with a sense of humor. The small size both encourages creativity and makes it possible for people with small collections to be on the same playing field as those with very large collections,” wrote AFOL Bruce Hietbrink in his March 2005 post on LUGNET, trying to define the first scenes he had seen from Japanese builders.

The vignette interests me because it is as much about building skill as it is about your ability to use your sense of humor. I find out that BrickCon, an AFOL convention I will be attending in October, will be having a group display around a zombie theme. This will be like the Belville challenge, except I’ll have time to prepare.

Although you’re free to put a lot of time into planning a vignette, the actual build time is meant to be short. I grab an 8 × 16 green baseplate and start to think about zombies. I also look at the clock and see that I’ve been playing with LEGO bricks for the better part of three hours. This means I’m late to pick up our weekly basket of vegetables from a local farmer, which Kate and I do as part of a community supported agriculture program. And thus, a zombie farmer vignette is born. A skeleton head on a minifig body clutches a hatchet, getting ready to “harvest” from a patch of minifig heads and torsos. I reason that even zombies are getting into the whole “grow local, eat local” movement, with organic brains. The joke, it turns out, takes a bit too much explaining when I try it out on my wife.

 

 

The zombie farmer joins the menagerie on top of the living room bookshelf. However, most adult fans don’t just display their creations in their homes; they want to show off their MOCs online. It’s a way to rank what they’ve built against other creations and also get some feedback. And so I register for
Brickshelf.com
, a controversial photo host that is loved by some adult fans of LEGO and reviled by others.

In 1999, Virginia AFOL Kevin Loch was just looking for a place to show off some of the cool LEGO creations that he had discovered. The software engineer launched Brickshelf as a side project, posting notices to LUGNET when he added new MOCs. A year later, he opened up the hosting site to the public, encouraging members to post their own MOCs free of charge.

Over the next seven years, Brickshelf swelled to host 1.7 million photos and 24 million page views a month. Loch’s hosting bill began to creep up, and the demands of running the site became too much. In July 2007, the site was shut down without warning for a few days, setting off a firestorm among AFOLs.

“Brickshelf has discontinued operation. We apologize for any inconvenience,” was the short explanation on the home page.

The ire of adult fans erupted on LUGNET, attacking Loch and bemoaning the loss of their pictures.

“What was once a great service to the AFOL community has become an embarrassment,” Bill Ward wrote a few days after the outage. “Kevin’s utter lack of communication with the community is unforgivable. It’s time to sell BS to someone who gives a damn.”

Brickshelf wasn’t sold. Loch agreed to keep it running with the help of heavy users, who would pay a $5 membership fee. But several AFOLs (particularly those who had lost photos during the site’s outage) felt it was too little, too late. And Brickshelf was no longer the center of the LEGO fan universe. Many adult fans migrated over to Flickr, the photo sharing service, and to
MOCpages.com
, a new photo-hosting site launched by the LEGOCERTIFIED professional Sean Kenney.

“With so many alternatives suddenly vying to be that second ‘something,’ I’d urge everyone to exercise caution in the coming months.... [B]ear in mind that Flickr probably can’t become the single LEGO hub that replaces Brickshelf,” wrote AFOL Andrew Becraft in a July 2007 post on Flickr.

Andrew is the voice behind the Brothers Brick, an influential LEGO fan Web site, and a former LEGO ambassador. He was one of the few to seek out compromises in the debate over Brickshelf.

The LEGO Ambassador Program debuted in 2005 after the then community liaison Jake McKee introduced the idea in January of that year.

“LEGO Ambassador’s mission is to help provide inspiration for LEGO builders of all ages and from all parts of the world,” wrote Jake in a post on LUGNET that invited applications.

The idea was to find builders who were active online and offline in promoting LEGO. In exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement (NDA), ambassadors would be given access to preproduct launch information and internal e-mails within the company.

“I wanted to help adult consumers understand the realities of the company and help company members understand why adult fans are interested in certain things,” was Jake’s response when I asked him about the early days of the Ambassador Program.

On one hand, this was an incredibly risky move by the LEGO company. Even with an NDA, they were sharing sensitive product information. They were also asking nonemployees to become involved in the corporate culture. At the same time, the program reinforced the established relationship between adult fans and LEGO. The fans would not be financially compensated for their time or efforts spent promoting the company. They would be rewarded with exclusive information, the product equivalent of spoilers, and an occasional gift of brick. Access was the currency. And many AFOLs, like Andrew Becraft, saw the Ambassador Program as an olive branch for the uproar caused by the brown and gray color change.

“The LEGO community failed to ask anyone in the adult fan community when that happened. It’s about compatibility and people’s collections. The color change led directly to the formation of the Ambassador Program. They realized they made a huge mistake,” said Andrew when we talked by phone.

The first four cycles were for six months each, and ambassadors had to reapply if they wanted to serve more than a single term. When Andrew submitted his name in 2007, it was with the idea that he could improve LEGO’s communication because of his involvement with the AFOL site
Classic-Castle.com
and the growing general readership of his blog, Brothers Brick.

“Every social group has its own lingo and jargon. In my day job [as a lead technical writer for Microsoft], I have to bring in new people and help them understand what we’re talking about. It’s something I think about a lot and was trying to bring to the LEGO world,” says Andrew.

That year, LEGO was still choosing the applicants, and the selection process was completely internal. It wasn’t until the fourth year of the program that the LEGO Company required people to be nominated by fellow adult fans and then selected the nominees with a goal of geographic, gender, and builder diversity. The result was like the United Nations, with forty ambassadors from twenty-two countries. And as in the real United Nations, women continued to be underrepresented, with only three female ambassadors. The idea that fans were controlling their representatives to LEGO also represented a subtle shift in power. It seemed that LEGO finally had figured out that the key to interacting with, and in some cases managing, the adult fan community was to provide exclusive access.

“LEGO understood they needed to court the AFOL community. By having the appearance of transparency and democratic equality, it helps to legitimize the ambassador program,” says Andrew.

 

 

In addition to being a former ambassador, Andrew has a skill that I need to learn if I’m going to share my MOCs with the online world. He takes beautiful pictures of LEGO minifigs, his most famous being a customized series of LEGO Aztec gods.

Taking photos of LEGO bricks is difficult. The shiny plastic reflects the flash, and more often than not, the final image is blurry or unfocused. White bricks tend to appear yellow, and detail is hard to discern because of shadow.

“Daylight is best, which we don’t get a lot of in Seattle,” Andrew says. He offers me a few simple tips. “Just grab a large piece of white posterboard and a tripod—you’re good to go with a cheap point-and-shoot on a time delay with the macro setting.”

I haven’t bought posterboard since elementary school, and making a photo box feels like a craft project. LEGO tends to photograph better against monochromatic backgrounds, particularly white. It’s hot in the August sun as I line up the small trucks and monorail on my driveway. I lie down in order to set up the shot properly. The tripod is slick in my sweaty hands and the concrete is burning my stomach as I put my eye up to the viewfinder. I mount the digital camera about eight inches from the photo box and set the time delay.

In the few seconds’ pause before the shutter clicks, the camera overbalances on the tripod and I end up with a time-release photo of my driveway and car tire. I’m wondering if I’ve broken my camera, when I look up and see a neighbor walking the dog. I wave from my prone position, a LEGO monorail in my hand. She waves back.