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.
When we had to put goggles on before we went out on stage for episode 7, we knew something was up. We didn’t expect to get pelted with newspapers blown at us by a giant fan. We picked up a few of the newspapers, and saw they were from 5+ years ago! Who just has those??
When Will introduced the challenge, we were quite honestly confused. What is a “giant centerpiece” that spins in the wind? I was thinking of all the things we could make spin in the wind: a dancer? A spaceship? Then the producers read the rules to us, and we realized we all had to make a windmill. Oh. Not quite as interesting, but we rolled with it!
Lauren and I had been wanting to do an undersea build for quite some time. We grew up going to tide pools in Laguna Beach, and wanted to recreate that rocky, vibrant environment teeming with life. The Little Mermaid is also close to Lauren’s heart, and I liked the opportunity to build fun sea creatures. So we set out to build Tidal Turbine Tango: when a fancy new turbine is placed in their ecosystem, all the creatures in that corner of the ocean gather around it, because they’ve realized that the currents from the turbine are perfect for dancing. I pulled a lot of inspiration from The Little Mermaid ride at Disney California Adventure, which has a big dance party section for “Under the Sea.”
Lauren felt committed to this idea, but I told her that I didn’t think we’d be the only ones to do an underwater build. It just seemed like too much fun to make wind power look like undersea currents. Sure enough, Caleb and Jacob had the same setting! But we were in different oceans, so it was okay.
Together, Lauren and I started by building up the turbine tower. We were no strangers to building a strong tower after our Cake build in episode 3, so we used a very similar technique for this. We used SNOT bricks all along the sides to build out from later on. Lauren then got started on the rocks along the base, intended to look like shallow, rocky tide pools. I meanwhile tried to work on the mechanism for the windmill.
You heard it here first: building a windmill is not as easy as it looks. I’m not an engineer, and know nothing about the physics of a windmill! My first attempt was flat, and it didn’t do anything. The second attempt I added curved slopes to the propellers, and got a little bit of movement. Finally, what did the trick was adding these white, large airplane fin parts that caught the wind really well. I started by placing them on all of the propellers, and it spun super-fast. I realized that it worked better to place the fins on just two propellers, to slow down the spin.
Finally, with the windmill ready and half the time gone, I got to work on the undersea characters, which was the part I was most excited about. I built the seahorses first, using minifigure legs to get the curl on their tails--it was awesome that the brick pit had multi-colored minifig legs! I also angled their bodies using Technic joints to get them tilted backward in a fun dancing pose. Next was the lobster, which I had fun posing like he’s saying “well, what the heck, guess I’m dancing.”
Then the starfish, which was built with a tricky technique I had never tried before, using hinge plates to create a pentagon, and attaching large orange wedges to each side of the pentagon. My favorite part is the mouth, made using quarter round tiles to get his big buck teeth. I built the jellyfish with little hot dogs as their smiling mouths, and long flexible joints for their arms.
With three hours left, Lauren had finished the rocky base and the little rock outcroppings for the characters. She then moved on to creating the fun, moving sea life plants with little neon chains hanging off of them, to catch in the wind. The plants were built using Technic axles and round bricks and plates running through them.
I turned my focus to decorating the white turbine tower. We decided to build “Sammy Squid” hanging on to the tower, writing “Dance Party” on the side in squid-ink graffiti. I built the squid arms with plates and quarter round tiles moving up and around the tower on both sides, and built the wording using purple and black Dots to look like ink.
While this was happening, Lauren added color and kelp to the base of the build, trying to address the judges’ note that our rocks needed more color. This was definitely a problem area for us; while we were always planning to add more color to the build, we definitely stepped it up a notch when the judges gave us that direct note. One thing we struggled with in this challenge was keeping constant communication on how we integrated color: we were strapped for time the whole way, so we each kind of went into our own rhythms and didn’t look as carefully at the composition of the whole to see if adding more color would actually improve the build!
Finally, time was up. When it was time for our windmill to perform, I wasn’t sure if anything would work! We had only tested it up to 17mph with the smaller fans, so it was anyone’s guess as to how the wind would affect the structure.
We were all standing about 20 feet behind our builds while the fan blew them to pieces. I remember someone asking if we should cover our necks for safety--wouldn’t want a sharp plate flying right at us! The producers assured us that they had tested and it would all be fine.
When the fan started up, we immediately saw the little plants and neon chains shaking, but couldn’t really see much else from our vantage point. But, the windmill was working! Will kept bumping it up a notch, further and further. We just didn’t want to be the lowest, which at that point was 20mph. It ended up withstanding 50mph, which we were so happy with!
In the end, this build landed us in the bottom two, mostly for the debate about color. Amy had mentioned that she loved our characters, especially the lobster, which cracked her up, and didn’t want them to get lost in the build with all the other colors. Jamie echoed the same sentiment. While it was nerve-wracking being there, we felt confident in the strength of our structure lasting all the way to 50mph, which was the same strength level as Dave & Richard’s winning build. We were so sad to see Maria & Philip leave--they are amazingly talented builders, and their attention to detail was awesome in everything they created. We had also gotten to know them so well over the course of the show.
This was our hardest challenge. We felt the creative constraints of us all having to build the same thing, and it was another strength & engineering challenge, which is inherently not something in our wheelhouse as story and character builders. But we survived, and moved on to another episode. And we still got to make some pretty cute undersea characters along the way, that would hopefully make Spongebob, Patrick, Sebastian, and Ariel proud.
