In the summer of 2021, my sister Lauren and I appeared on the second season of LEGO Masters on FOX. These breakdowns delve into each episode and talk about the process behind the build, the challenges Lauren and I faced, and the stories of our finished products.
Every episode, we walk in and expect to see something crazy. That didn’t happen for episode 5. Will and the judges were standing there next to a little podium, topped with a stack of papers. My mind started spinning with what it could be. I was hoping they were scripts. A storytelling challenge? Write your own script!? Would we finally be building something that could just sit on a table, and didn’t have to perform in some crazy way??
The answer...nope. In fact, they were taking the tables away from us. Will’s “boss” told us that we had to build something floating from a single, hanging Technic 1x14 brick. We saw the bricks come down from the ceiling, and someone on the crew told us they’d been there the whole time, just hiding up in the rafters. What?! I guess if we looked really closely at the ceiling in the previous episodes, we could’ve seen a future challenge.
Lauren took the lead on our story concept. She was inspired by her favorite Barbie movies from growing up, one of which included “sky painters.” She thought it was a cool starting point, and I agreed. I saw the potential in using all the really interesting colors in the brick pit to create gradients like a sunrise and sunset. We love watching sunrises and sunsets in California, and wanted to capture some of that magic in the build.
So, we decided to build the Palace of the Sky Painters. Perched in their crystal castle in the clouds would be two sky painters: Sunrise and Sunset. On one side, Sunrise would be painting with her light blues, pinks, and yellows. On the other would be Sunset, painting with her deep purples and oranges. Their brushstrokes would combine to meet at the sun.
It didn’t sound too tricky in theory, but building from one hanging Technic brick proved to be really difficult. The wires holding the brick to the ceiling were wrapped through three of the Technic brick’s holes, so those were out of commission. Every time you attached a brick, the whole build would spin, and it was easy to lose track of what part you were working on. I started by building a (hopefully) strong box structure with SNOT bricks on the side. We saw most other teams adopting a Technic core structure for their builds. For better or worse, I used a basic brick structure to create our core.
Lauren started by building large spherical sides, like those that would be used in giant Lowell spheres. We had built large spheres like this before for an “Ice Cream Island” creation, and decided to just make a ton of them to create a round, fluffy cloud.
The cloud proved to be way more time-consuming than we expected. I was really struggling with the core: both the dimensions, and not being sure how it would match up with Lauren’s spherical sides. I had a bit of a breakthrough when I realized I could build the core as separate compartments, attached by Technic pins. Still, when the cloud sides went on, the core was still a little too big, so we had to cover the bottom with an additional plate layer. We definitely could have strategized this a different way, but with time running out, we had to work with what we had. When the Brickmasters came around, we had very little to show. Jamie didn’t like that our build was hanging slightly askew, so we figured we’d come back to address that.
With half of the time gone, we weren’t even done with the cloud--the bottom still had to be built. I switched gears and moved on to the characters. I was trying to make them feel like cartoony, other-worldly fairies, whose look incorporated the colors of their paint brush strokes. I had to go through a couple face designs, and still could have tweaked them for longer if we had more time. I gave them wings for eyelashes, and built their eyes with multiple round plates slightly off-set to give a wide, “eye-shadow” look incorporating each character’s colors.
Lauren meanwhile moved on to the palace, which we decided would be made completely out of translucent bricks. Since those bricks have very few available shapes, we were limited by what we had. Lauren built up a very tall castle with 1x2 bricks, 2x2 slopes, and 2x2 round bricks, all translucent. It was pretty tall, and really cool. The problem is, with only those types of bricks on-hand, it’s hard to build strong.
At this point, Will came over for a check-in, and decided he wanted to call our mom. The producers brought Lauren’s phone out of holding, and he called her. Amazingly, our mom picked up! Will called her by her first name, Margie, and they got to chatting. He asked if she had a favorite kid, and our mom gave a perfect answer (no). He asked if I had always worn blazers, and to my embarrassment, she recounted a story of my first formal dance where I wore a blazer. She talked about how she handled us when we misbehaved, and how rewarding it is to see your kids pursue their creative passions. Will and her got along great, and they’re on a first-name basis now. All the producers loved the call, too--we were very surprised it didn’t end up in the episode!
After Will called our mom, we had about 4 hours to go. I started quickly making the Sky Painters’ brush strokes, using the really cool colors I found in the brick bit. For those into LEGO colors, for Sunrise I made a gradient with: dark azure, medium azure, bright pink, and bright light yellow. For Sunset, it was dark purple, dark pink, orange, and bright light orange. I made these with a pretty standard brick-built curvature technique, though I wanted the strokes to start small at the top, and widen as they go along to give some contour to the shape.
A challenge with creating the paint strokes was the limited types of bricks available in each color in the brick pit. I had to make lots of substitutions: two 1x2 bricks to make a 2x2, two 1x3 plates to make a 2x3 plate, that sort of thing. It made the whole process more time-consuming. With 2 and a half hours left, I was done with the paint strokes, and had to get going on the sun.
The sun was attached to the paint strokes through a central box structure that had SNOT connections on all sides. This allowed me to create rounded discs at the front and back of the sun that could be attached later. I then used a bunch of orange wedge plates to create the rays of the sun radiating out in all directions. I included 3 layers of rays, all off-set from each other. This design was inspired by a rotating sun that I’ve always loved on It’s A Small World at Disneyland.
With less than an hour to go, we still had to finish the bottom of the cloud, which we had saved to the end to do the more essential features. Lauren started working on it, when...CRASH. My heart dropped, and I saw the entire top part of the palace collapse, and hit Lauren in the face on the way down. And, to make things even more stressful, Will saw it happen. He came over to us, and I was just trying to keep it together. As you can see in the episode, we just needed to keep building while he was there. I was smiling and laughing along, but inside I was thinking we have so much to get done still! You have to let us build!
We had lost half our palace, and the underside of the clouds wasn’t done. I was also thinking about Jamie’s note that the cloud was askew--I didn’t want that to impact our judging. To address this, I started building out the underside of the clouds with standard brick, rather than the SNOT sphere technique we were going for, to try to get one side of the cloud to be heavier. It kind of worked, but I think we sacrificed some of the aesthetics as a result. Maybe if I had the chance to do it over, I would’ve cut my losses on the build hanging askew to have a cleaner cloud sphere design.
Lauren worked on salvaging the palace, which she built up to a portion of its former size. It’s not as grand as it was before, but it at least looked like a more finished structure. With 2 minutes to go, Lauren and I added little translucent discs to give a cotton candy pop to the cloud. When time was up, we were exhausted. This was our first build where we were really scrambling for time, and had to make some sacrifices as a result. I was happy with some parts of it--particularly the brush strokes and the sun--but I felt this end result was less polished than our previous ones. One thing we loved about the build was the shape. It stood out in the room for its bright colors and the unique curvature of the sides. The Brickmasters noted that this build definitely couldn’t sit on a table, so they liked that we embraced the challenge with the concept and execution. It certainly had its shortcomings, but this was a build that made us more motivated to have better time management on the next one. And, it’s pretty cool that Will and our mom are best friends now.
