Designer insight: Michael Svane Knap
Posted by Huwbot,
Many LEGO set designers use our BrickLists feature to maintain a list of the sets they've worked on and often provide interesting insights about their involvement.
Once a week we publish an entry from one of their lists on the home page to increase awareness of this information and to encourage more designers to create them.
Michael Svane Knap wrote this about their work on 70617 Temple of the Ultimate Ultimate Weapon:
The Temple went through several stages before settling on the final design. Because the temple does not appear before the final act of the movie it made the development of the set very hard.
In the end the aim was to make a set that was loaded with small traps and play features but at the same time would look great on the shelf.
As a small side note, the golden pieces in the chest was originally thought as the Ultimate Ultimate weapon. When I designed the set the story of the movie was that Wu would reveal that if was Cornflakes in the temple that they would use as weapon. I put in the golden flower element with the intention to make them look like cornflakes, however there was an chance that they will be written out and they did, so now they are just fancy golden flowers in a crate.
The design of the dogs came together as a collaboration of the hole team, and i took the best parts and put it in to the two guards.
There are a couple of small Easter eggs hidden in the set, the most obius one is the statue, it have a name tag that goes with it, on the name tag it says "Master Knap". Another fun fact is that in the set there is skeleton parts scatted all over the building, if you take the hands from the hanging prison, the torso from the basement, the skeleton foot under the pillars and the head from the sword room you will be able to assemble a full skeleton.
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12 comments on this article
I was just watching TLNM yesterday to see if it was as bad I remember. (It is.)
Today I'm looking for hidden cameras in my condo, because Huwbot is apparently watching me.
71767: Ninja Dojo Temple has a very similar layout , really good recent set that just retired.
71795: Temple of the Dragon Energy Cores kind of fills the same design style but for almost the same price, almost has no interior.
So that's why 71019-4 comes with a box of cornflakes!
Well there you go, I’ve always wondered why the ‘actual’ elemental weapons didn’t appear in the set, in fact Cole’s rock element has never appeared in a set in black*
*I think
Back at it again
71721 is one of the all-time best from Lego.
More please.
Wait, Lego has a Hole Team? I guess that explains 31129 Majestic Tiger…
@Murdoch17 said:
"I was just watching TLNM yesterday to see if it was as bad I remember. (It is.)
Today I'm looking for hidden cameras in my condo, because Huwbot is apparently watching me."
I don’t think it’s a dreadful film, per se - it has some excellent environmental designs, a half decent story, some great integration of “real world” elements and a clear love of martial arts subject matter. But it’s inevitably hamstrung by its source material and comes across as a bit nonsensical without understanding why, say, one of the main characters is a robot.
I think they did the best with what they had, but given its relatively niche inspiration I feel like it was always going to fail as a movie aiming for broad appeal.
@_Callie_ said:
"Wait, Lego has a Hole Team? I guess that explains 31129 Majestic Tiger…"
Hole article good use a proper edit, get the bot on it.
@TheOtherMike said:
"So that's why 71019-4 comes with a box of cornflakes!"
Didn't two other figures in TLNM series come with cereal bowls as well? I never understood any of those accessories, just accepted them for what they were.
Corn flakes were going to be the heroes' weapon.
...
So by the time The Lego Ninjago Movie came out I had stopped following the show for a few years (The first half of "season 2" / year 3 being entirely filler burned me out hard and "season 3" / "Rebooted" lost me after a certain point as things began to feel more and more formulaic) yet I was generally excited about the prospect of a theatrical movie, as it seemed like a prime opportunity to get lapsed fans back in and potentially pull upon some of the early brand atmosphere they were somewhat moving away from. The first images and trailer showing the new hair designs were a hard pill to swallow at first but I eventually got used to them (as everyone eventually did due to shortsighted brand synergy changes that were incoming). Garmadon's new minifig design was excellent and some sets like 70612 were very striking (despite having the ninja continue to focus on mechs and techy vehicles to my chagrin).
However, the more I saw of the movie, the more misguided I felt it was, and everything from watching it twice in theaters and learning about the production afterward really shows that this whole thing was a production trainwreck, at one point involving the Great Devourer, ditching large swaths of lore and characterization, leaning too far into the "real world" twist of The Lego Movie, and seeming to be disinterested in adapting Ninjago as its own work but to use brand as a vessel to make a Lego-based parody of Japanese cinema.
And this factoid just proves that.
Thanks for sharing these insights! Very fond of this great looking set.
one of the best Ninjago sets ever