LEGO Masters week 9 exit interview
Posted by MeganL,
Week 9 is done and now we're down to four teams. I for one am happy that we're getting back into a regular rotation of episodes, having the breaks due to the All-Star Game and the Olympics, while understandable, was also really disruptive. So, for those who haven't seen the episode yet, don't click on the link. For those who have or don't mind knowing, see a quick recap and the interview with the exiting fifth team after the break.
**Edit: Final build pictures added below**
The producers are coming up with great challenges for the teams. For the first time in the US show, builders had to spend the first part of the challenge building alone. Teams were separated by a large wall down the middle of the studio. One half of the team had to build a land creature, the other half had to build a sea creature. After that part was complete, the teams had to combine the builds to come up with a unique species, and create that character's world.
Unfortunately, FOX did not provide pictures of the completed builds this week, otherwise, right here I would show you the winning build of Caleb and Jacob, which was the combination of a lobster and a chameleon. (If I do get access to the pictures, I'll include them. Edit: see below.) It was the first win for the twins, and shows their growth as builders as the season has progressed.
The judges had an unenviable job, but at the end of the day, the team of Dave and Richard were sent home. I found this to be a bit of a surprise; Dave and Richard had won three challenges and really looked like a team to beat. On a personal level, I was sorry to see them go - any team that manages to include the Fibonacci Series in a build on national TV wins extra points from me.
It seems you were sent home because of a difference in interpretation of the challenge. What are your thoughts on that?
Richard: It's weird. I think the issue for me was how my build can be interpreted. The challenge that I had was, “Okay, I'm gonna create coral.” It’s wacky and crazy. Is it a creature, or is it an environment? That was something that I was grappling with a lot. So, what came later on in terms of the twist in the challenge, I was able to put some of that stuff behind me. But ultimately with the way the result of our creature was interpreted threw me for a loop. It was very noticeable. The coral was very present. It was misinterpreted as a penguin, I think they saw a penguin but that's not what we were calling it. We called it Poco the entire time, and even a lot of the recaps tend to say penguin in it. It's not a penguin, it’s a Poco. It's a new creature, it's a Poco. It's not like it's a penguin and coral. That's why you have Poco. I think that was a misinterpretation to an extent.
Dave: It's a very layered question. I know exactly what Richard is talking about. One time we said to the Brickmasters, “We're gonna make a punk rock penguin,” and that was it. That's how the edit was made. Every other time, we referred to it as Poco. Penguin and coral put together, a portmanteau. We’re known as a team for thinking differently from other teams. We built the exoskeleton tower, totally different than what everybody did. We leave the wheels completely uncovered on the car, and nothing gets stuck. We think about sound as well as motion. And those are just the challenges we won. I mean, you can talk about so many other builds but also thinking differently. What we always wanted to do was think differently, to think outside the box. I will admit, I'm somebody who keys in on certain things when the Brickmasters talk. They may have said “mash up” a lot of times, but what I keyed in on was they said “We want a creature we've never seen before, and bring us into their world.” So, when we're putting the coral on top of the penguin, and then it's infusing down his body into different parts of his body, he has become something new. He's not a penguin. If you look at that penguin, it's nothing like what the final build ended up being. It was two totally different things. Building in a vacuum was not good for me. I didn't enjoy building that penguin by myself. I was like, “What am I thinking? I'm building black and white in front of Amy! This is not a good choice.” It needs to be something else, but when we came together, you could see the two things becoming something new, and to us, it was a new character that you’d never seen before. This was not a penguin anymore. You don't see a penguin. We made a character, because we know from watching last season, the Brickmasters love characters, they love storytelling. Ultimately, we didn't get rewarded for thinking differently, and I respect that opinion. This is the way that the rules are interpreted. As a teacher, I'm always looking for kids who are trying to think creatively and look for different solutions and I think that that is something also important in life.
You won three challenges. What was your reaction to having to go home this week?
Richard: That's a very layered question, and my first answer to that is that this show doesn't allow you to rest on your laurels. Our production schedule didn't allow us to be able to relax and just have a break and revel in a victory or revel in being safe. We just had to just think about the next day and the next build. For us, that's not the easiest thing because our builds are so different. We couldn’t say that we're going to want to do something similar to what we did in the previous build for the next one. So we had to just completely wipe the slate clean and just start fresh every time. It was really difficult to do that. It's like playing sports. When you have a game, you have a moment to enjoy that victory and just be proud of yourself. We're just constantly trying to push ourselves to be better, and to do bigger or do something stronger, and also anticipate the unknown. There were so many curveballs, things that we couldn't expect, so honestly we just had to have a positive state of mind.
Dave: We put ourselves in every build. It's hard to be disappointed when you do that. Because if you really put what you believe down in brick, then you're not going to be disappointed that you didn't do a good job because you know that you've represented yourself and you're true to yourself. I think that was one of the things that made it easy to say, “The Brickmasters might not have liked our build as much as they liked something else, but we love it just as much as everything that we've done.” No matter what, at the end of the day we're so proud of every single build we did. No matter if it fell forward or didn't have enough coral on it. We love it. It's fine. We think it's great, and hopefully other people see that too.
Richard: And I'm gonna say just real quick that I was so happy once I was able to work with Dave again in that challenge. There was something missing, building alone. When we picked back up it was like we started the season over. It was weird, but we hit the ground running and we had so much to talk about. I'm really happy that things went the way that they went.
What are some of the details from your builds that we didn't get to see on the show?
Richard: Honestly, I may have missed something in the most recent episode in land and sea, I don't think there was enough screen time on the environment of Poco. Maybe there was a flash of a section, but I don't think we really got to see the 360 degree view of everything. There are a lot of elements in there, down to the fish bones in a bucket that we made for Poco. There was an amp with cords going into the guitar. I think the scale of the guitar was just as impressive as the wingspan of Poco. You know, when you really look closely at that build, there was a lot to notice. There was a really great brick wall around him to show that it gave that vignette type of feel, but on a really big scale.
Dave: I think that also, not just the environment, but a lot that was cut out of that build was how the coral texture had spread onto the feet, how it spread onto the chest, how there was even some on the beak, but that just wasn't part of the cut. In the first build, the parade float had so much more going on than what was shown. From the way that the letters spun, and the design of the letters was based on the flags of New York and Chicago. The chefs had movement - although it ultimately did fail just as it was coming around the corner - they were waving the toppings on both the pizza and the hot dog. We made sure that hot dog had every single Chicago style topping on it. And the skylines in the back… there was so much detail in that build, and we really put everything we had into it because you're on LEGO Masters, when are you going to get a chance to do that again? So you might as well throw everything literally on the table.
Richard: Another thing that I think was really important was in the hero shot episode was the amphitheatre that was built behind the urban blight. The goal was that once the building exploded and fell apart, you would see a little amphitheatre with minifigures in the back, now enjoying the music being played by our hero. There was a lot more focus on the explosion and not the aftermath of the explosion, which was just as important. Because every story has a beginning, middle and end, and the end was this happy, joyous, melodic, harmonious balance between men and nature. I want to make sure I have our wording right because that was essential to our story because we had such a difficult minifigure.
Can you walk us through the puppet challenge and what the design process was?
Dave: So, again we needed to consider how much LEGO weighs. We learned our lesson on that one. There were two strategies: people had rods, or people had bust puppets, and we went with the rod. But instead of putting it in the head or holding it way down low, we put it right in the torso, because anything you try to hold up that long above your head, you're gonna get tired doing it. It's heavy, and holding up for a long time gets really heavy. There were so many parts of the head. It's hard to talk about everything. One choice was making the skin smooth versus making the body textured. We're both huge Muppet fans. We had talked so much about the Muppets before this episode, before we even knew about this challenge. We were talking about our favourite Muppets. I actually talked to Anthony Domenici (executive producer), because I knew that he had worked with the Muppets before. I had asked him, “Tell me about your time working with the Muppets and why you think Rowlf is the best Muppet”, because I think Rowlf has the best mouth and I just wanted him to confirm that. Then all of a sudden we had this puppet challenge. It was unbelievable. But I love that puppet. It was so fun. It was so fun to make a full body puppet. I think it would have been great if we could have kept the legs at the length that we originally had them at, but we really had to shed weight, because it was getting so heavy.
Richard: And I did not want to put all that pressure on Dave to hold it up while I was trying to read the script. At one point it was going to be both of us working the puppet, but I think we would have lost something in the process with us trying to spend too much time on the performance so we did the best we could.
A theme in the challenges was either building them to be destroyed, or in this one, taking apart two different builds and combining them. How did you handle those different kinds of builds?
Richard: It was pretty seamless for us to be able to incorporate the coral into the penguin because we knew instantly, where it could go and how much we can use so that it could have a fair balance between both creatures and making this hybrid. So, once we got the coral on you felt like, “Alright, let's just make this environment and make this crazy cool story that was going to really wow people.”. The goal was to bring everyone into the creature’s world, but also that world should be so robust, and I felt like it was pretty seamless in the beginning. The scale of mine was paled in comparison to Dave’s. With five hours and having never built coral before I was like,”Alright, I'm just gonna do what I can and I want to get all my touch points.” I wanted to be colourful. I wanted to be movable. That was something that was not really highlighted. It's an afterthought, but there was some movement in the coral, it was colourful, it had its own style and texture to it, and it was unique.
Dave: I think that when you watch LEGO Masters Season One and it's all about the twist, and you watch LEGO Masters Season Two and it's all about what limits can you push LEGO to. Neither one's right and neither one's wrong. They're just so different, and pushing the limits is something that our team was constantly about. We tried to think outside of the box on so many challenges. So, pushing the limits of LEGO was like pushing the limits of creativity so I appreciated it. Maybe they didn't all have to be all in a row. (laughs) Maybe we could have mixed it up a little bit, but it was fun. It was super fun. But when else are you gonna get a chance to do some of these things? I don't have a pyrotechnic guy at my house wiring up my LEGO for me. I don't have a giant fan. This is the only time this is ever going to happen. We should be so excited about these opportunities.
What are your art influences?
Dave: For me, the influence is really life experiences. I like to look at what's happening around me. There are spheres of influence around all of us, so you have your people who you live with in your home, there are people in your neighbourhood, there are people in your city, there are people in your state. It just goes out from there, radiating out, and the things that happened to me in my life is where I draw my art influence from. But I also look to the LEGO community and I want to see what's being done there. Because you can't just build in a vacuum. I think one of the most important things about working with Richard, that we never built in a vacuum. We always collaborated together and our builds were better because of that.
Richard: I totally agree with Dave. For me, I find art in everything. Coming from New York, and constantly surrounded by art - my son wants to be an animator when he gets older - so I'm constantly looking at things that he's inspired by: cartoons, different drawing styles. Art is in everything from composition to colour to details. Coming from New York, I've always been surrounded by street art and graffiti and I've always appreciated fine art. In terms of composition and texture, I'm a huge fan of Piet Mondrian. The colours are really very much like what LEGO does with a lot of their primary colours. Dave and I talked so much about composition and art styles in our builds. That was a focal point for a lot of what we did. You can really draw inspiration from so many different corners of life and be able to make those connections to spark connections in our builds.
Which model that you built in LEGO Masters is the most personal to you?
Richard: They're all really personal. I think we went into every build with that intention. We wanted to make them a reflection of us and a reflection of something that was personal or sentimental to us. Even down to the puppet’s shoes and things like that. There were the things that even people weren't able to see, like the shoes. But I love the Clark style of desert boot or the Wallabies. There's always a little taste of reality in the things that we do. We want our builds to live in the real world because they come from the real world.
Dave: I don’t think you can take this work of nine builds, and pull it apart because it tells a story of who we are as people, and what we believe in both on a personal level and on a social level. None of these builds, I don't think either of us could say is the most personal to us because each one is a different part of us. We're complex people. We're all complex people, and you can't just say one build was a personal build, they were all personal builds for us and I think that’s one of the things that set our team apart.
Richard: We also couldn't do one build without doing another one. There are so many things that we learn from one build going into the next build and things that we didn't want to do from the previous one in the next one. There were so many learning experiences in each episode and so we're grateful to have grown. I think our entire body of work shows growth.
Dave: When you're building something - I learned this from one of my favourite podcasts - it talks about film directors and how each film that a director makes, their subsequent film is a reaction to what they had done before. So each one of our builds is a reaction to what we had done in the previous build, and that's why you really have to look at it as an entire body of work.
Prior to going into LEGO Masters, how would you have classified your own building style and how well did that translate to being on a reality show?
Richard: For me, I think my building style was just more about efficiency, and not so much specific things. I’m a collector of sets and someone who is still learning how to build original creations. I was learning through this entire process. So, for the most part I would say my storytelling and my efficiency in building was really the crux of what I brought to the show.
Dave: When I think about building LEGO, I never think about competitive speed building which is what LEGO Master is. For me, building LEGO is about taking time to think about what I want to build. I'm very much a person who processes things in my mind. I don't build digitally, I don't draw things out, but I'll go to bed, and I'll wake up the next morning with it, because I've been thinking about it. I'm always thinking about whatever I'm building, and I kind of build in my head in advance. But on LEGO Masters, you can't do that because you just have to start building. The clock is running and you just have to build. It was a totally different way of building, but I think we were really successful at it. I think time really wasn't much of an issue for our team. It was more sometimes we didn't have enough time to think in advance, and have enough time to adjust. But I'm still proud of every single build we did and I think they're all great.
What advice would you give to your pre-LEGO Masters self?
Dave: My advice to my pre-LEGO Masters self would be really consider how much LEGO weighs, and how much it weighs if you put it on your body.
Richard: Yes, I think that's a life lesson right there. Knowing how much you can handle and just being realistic with what you can put on your plate. I think we were a little overly ambitious sometimes. To answer your question, I think if I could tell myself something different, I would pay more attention to the math that's involved in LEGO. I would be more conscious of how many rows of studs I would have to go over, and then how that applies even to sculpting. That's something that I think I overlooked on some occasions. I think it's really important to pay attention to where you are in your process. When you’re building, you have your head down and you're just like in a tunnel and you're just trying to get this thing done. But then sometimes you forget that you have to pace yourself. You have to be aware of where you are with each brick that you put down.
How did you handle having to come up with novel creative ideas one right after the other in such a short period of time?
Dave: I think one of the keys is just the way that we communicate with each other and that we trust each other. Even though we had never built together before LEGO Masters, we had spent a lot of time talking on the phone leading up to it, a lot of time just learning about each other, and learning about how the other person thinks. On our days when we could, we would go for walks together and just talk about things, whether it was about the show, or about our personal lives, or maybe watching the NBA All Star game together, just making connections. Because we could make those connections with each other. It meant that you could throw out any idea, and find a way to make it work. For example, when we got the violin guy, Richard started talking about environmentalism. That was one of the touch points that we came into the show with, that he wanted to do an environmental build. I was thinking, what does the violin guy have to do with environmentalism? He explained it, and I trusted him, and we made it work. It was a really successful build, but that trust in that communication is what made our creativity flow.
Did you have a mission when you started the show, and did you accomplish it?
Dave: The moment when they said that we were activist friends was probably the moment that I felt like we did it. It was very early on, and that let us know that they accepted us for who we wanted to be on the show and didn't force us to be something. They didn't make us activist friends. We are activist friends. We care about things, and we're friends through that activism. The fact that we were allowed to do that through our builds, through our storytelling through who we are as people really meant a lot. We've gotten so many comments on social media but also when we go to conventions or events, people say, “I see what you're doing. And I appreciate it and thank you for doing that.” And that almost means more than anything else.
Richard: I wanted, when people saw our builds, that they saw a little bit of themselves in it. Coming into the show, I've never built with anyone before, so I didn't want to just hog this opportunity for myself and just go crazy. Just make a bunch of space stuff and things that I grew up doing. I didn't want to do the same thing that I was used to seeing in LEGO. I wanted to do something that had never been done before, and I think that's the stuff that really attracts me to LEGO as an adult now. I can see my world through LEGO and I can see I can apply LEGO to so many other things that I wasn't aware of and didn't have the capabilities to. This was an opportunity to just go where we were never able to go with the resources that we had, and we're really, really proud of what we've done and the platform to be able to speak without a filter.
Dave: I talked to my son last night (after the episode aired) and we were talking about, “Well, you didn't win, Dad.” And I said, “You're right. I didn't win, but sometimes it's not about winning, it's about what you do on the show, and what other people are learning from what you're doing.” I listed off the things that we talked about on the show. We got black lives matter on TV. We talked about redistribution of wealth. We talked about helping the earth. We talked about being a good parent. We even talked about LGBTQ+ rights that didn't make the cut, but it was all in there. And sometimes that's more important, and he was like, “Yeah, but if you had the money we could have also helped people, too.”
Richard: (laughing) Yes, thanks to (Dave’s son) for reminding us!
Now that the show is over, are you going to continue building together?
Richard: First of all, I've never been to any of the LEGO conventions. I know of them, I've just never been to any. I have so much more that I want to learn as a builder, other people I'd like to meet, but I want to meet those people through Dave. When we were going into the show, there were so many there were so many people that he was familiar with. He was telling me about some of their really great work and I was just really fascinated by this whole world that I was just getting accustomed to just through writing about LEGO. I want to really continue on forward. Dave and I talk every other day and it's not just about LEGOs, so I'm happy that I have like a friend and we have new experiences and new adventures to have together.
Dave: How often do adults make new friends? Like lifelong friends? It doesn't happen especially once you have kids. You don't make friends like this very often and to have gone through this experience together is special. Anybody who has been in a creative situation knows how stressful it is but also how much you can get out of it. And we not only got great builds out of it but we got a great partnership out of it. There's no reason this partnership should end because over the last nine weeks, we've been doing many builds. I might be doing the build, but I'm running things by Richard as I'm doing it and he's doing the writing to go with it. It's that combined effort. It's not just what you build. Anybody who does LEGO knows you're presenting, not just your build, but you're thinking about how to present it, what the words are, it's all important. All of that goes together to make it part of a story that you're telling through your builds. So, this is definitely a collaboration that's going to keep happening.
Richard: Oh yeah, I can't wait.
Many thanks to our friends at The Brothers Brick, BZ Power and True North Bricks for their collaboration on this interview.
All photo credit: FOX
Final build pictures:
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19 comments on this article
If it’s any reassurance, I too was confused on just what they meant by “mashup”. I wasn’t sure if the judges wanted the animals combined together, or if they wanted to somehow work the creatures into some sort of scene. I can definitely see how it was a case of the instructions not being clear.
Pics are available on @LEGOMastersFOX Twitter.
I can see why they got sent home. They built a penguin with a mohawk, not a combo of a penguin and coral. It's much easier to identify the animal combos for the other teams. They should have built a coral structure out of many small penguins or even a large penguin out of many small penguins to combine the 2 animals together.
It is sad that they had to go home, because I really like them as contestants, but I saw it coming. While I was watching I really hoped they'd integrate more coral elements on the character.
How they edit things you can usually tell who will be in the bottom two, if not being able to guess who is going home that episode.
These two were the team to beat for so long. Very creative. Y'all should be proud. I was constantly impressed. Especially the fan one with the sound and the pollen going from the flowers and how they swayed in the wind. Brilliant!
With the mashup...very confusing. I think the instructions could have been clearer. I think the scene looked great overall, but for the character/species itself I really only saw a penguin with a coral mohawk.
With that said, I can't say Zach and Wayne's mashup was any better than Michelle and Natalie's. They both got lost in the background, but the judges only comment negatively on M and N's, so who knows what these judges are looking for.
**moderator edited to remove name-callIng** In fact they should have been dismissed weeks ago when the epic failure of their poorly-designed hat came crashing to the ground. Moto and Paras's hat crashed too, but at least it was nicer to look at. I feel like the producers kept these guys around a bit longer for the politics. I am happy to see the redistribution of contestants on Lego Masters. Also, how can they keep saying its not a penguin? Its obviously a penguin and no amount of reality denying or dishonesty will change that.
I understand that they’re calling it something else, and saying it’s a new animal. But the fact of the matter is it looks like a penguin with a Mohawk. The coral didn’t stick out as being coral. All of the other creatures you could tell it was a mashup. I guess had the coral been bigger or more pronounced it could have looked more like a new creature.
The contestants may have brought the inevitable comparison on themselves by referring to their mash-up as a "punk rock penguin." Even if they stated the term "Poco" again and again (off-camera) as the name of their new species, by initially stating "we're going to make a punk rock penguin," they may have set the judges' mindset in that regard, and (despite the creative add-ons and the impressive guitar) that's what the judges saw in the end, a punk rock penguin.
Yeah... it really was a penguin with a mohawk. I get that they didn't think of it that way because they called it a Poco but looking at it as a viewer (and a brickmaster apparently) what's obviously right there is a penguin. A rose by any other name, and so on.
It was a penguin with a mowhawk. They may refer to it as "Poco", but that comes off as a proper name, not the name of a kind of hybrid animal. (...and wouldn't a portmanteau of "penguin" and "coral" be "Peco"?)
Anyway, although people here are saying instructions weren't clear, what WAS clear was that they weren't expecting you to just chop each model in half and stick them together. They wanted a hybrid creature. You can't just give a penguin a mowhawk and some other random studs on his body and call it a day. Replace his fins with coral. Replace his feet with long coral legs. Taking a penguin and putting coral on top is clearly not enough effort.
It was a nice looking penguin and the coral was interesting, but as I watched I felt fairly certain the lack of a true integration between the two was going to be what sent them home. In fact, from the start of the episode, I was certain that they'd have teams combine the builds in some way. I expected they'd have to build a common environment that tells a story between the two and didn't expect they'd have to do a mashup, but I KNEW there was going to be more to it (even without seeing previews that might have given it away.)
It might have been enough to keep them from going home if they had changed the black and white of the original penguin into purples and pinks or other vibrant coral colors along with adding the coral bits all over.
I appreciate Richard's wanting to attempt unique builds, but I think he over did it on choosing coral seeing as it blurs the line between what might be considered environment versus animal to the lay person, and in hindsight with the added challenge that the teams had to combine their builds to invent a completely new species that wouldn't be too recognizable as one or the other original creature.
Others have said it, but I’ll reiterate: just calling it something else doesn’t change the fact that it is just a penguin with a weird haircut.
This team entered the second half of the mashup competition with a rather severe handicap. The coral that they built is the exoskeletons of numerous individual animals in a colony rather than a single animal. And the problem with that is that their challenge became one of combining numerous tiny animals with exoskeletons with one large animal with an endoskeleton. So of course the large animal dominated the result. Add to that the fact that many corals are rigid, and you end up trying to combine an agile creature with what are essentially a bunch of shells and keep some semblance of motion. Choosing coral was a gamble to be different, and it could have proven out. In this case that gamble just didn't pay off.
As I was watching this episode, I was wondering if splitting up the teams was another way of addressing the criticism for S1 where conspiracy theorists were claiming the show was rigged to give Tyler and Amy the win. The first half of an even longer season had more technical challenges than all of S1, and this challenge required both partners to deliver a solid solo build.
Regarding this challenge, I completely agree with the judges that, at least to a TV audience, it looked like a penguin with a punk hairdo. Other than the color scheme, I couldn’t recognize the original coral in the final build, and that definitely hurt them in the end. Based on the judges’ comments, I honestly expected to see the Vikings in the bottom two, and was shocked that they managed to squeak through in the sole neutral slot, allowing them to hang on to that golden brick for one final week (I’m pretty sure tonight is when they’ll be forced to use it or let it expire, because it has to be taken out of play to ensure a fair finale). Before the judges opened their mouths, I actually expected to hear positive comments. Sure, the two animals were of wildly different scales, but they were trying to connect a 4” cylinder to an 8” cylinder. The top of the jellyfish provided a large, versatile surface to mount the giraffe head on, and they did carry the reticulated pattern down into the tentacles.
The thing that really bugs me, though, is that they told one team that their (really colorful) model tended to blend in to their (really colorful) environment, and then Caleb and Jacob were criticized for making a realistic environment that wasn’t an explosion of bright colors. I felt they did deserve the win, but I wasn’t expecting them to get it just based on the criticism they received right before the top two teams were announced.
@PurpleDave
The judges are all over the place with their critiques. One moment they will criticize one team for something and then praise another for (what appears to me) the exact same thing. I don't get it.
So the results were telegraphed with the bit of handwritten notes from home, but then when the combination models were shown, I was unsure who would go home. I actually thought that when the judges went off to the side and we saw them talking, it meant that maybe nobody would go home because all three that had the harshest criticism kind of equally failed at making combos with environments in different ways, and thus, there was no conclusive answer to who should have gone home.
Mark and Steven had such a large shift in scale that it couldn't not look like a Giraffe head on a Jellyfish. I also found their landscape to be a bit bare, but the judges appreciated the design of the kelp.
Michelle and Natalie had a wonderful creature, but it got lost in the environment, which didn't look all too well put together.
Then we have Dave and Richard, whose build does look a lot like a penguin with a mohawk, but they salvaged the build with the incredible environment, which was implied to have just as much to do with the success of the challenge beyond successfully combining the creatures.
Well what parts of the challenge are important? Is it the combination of creatures, or the environment, because all three were penalized for something. While Caleb and Jacob, and Zack and Wayne were able to make their combos work, it seemed like everyone had a struggle because not once were the teams able to meet up for say just 2 minutes halfway through their builds and at least see what their partners were building. I'm not saying that they needed to be part of the build process for each other's creatures or even speak about the possibility of what was to come, but say that the whole challenge was just building creatures separate from each other and the best pairs won, you would want to try and have your team build in a proportionate scale or share a stylistic design to better sell your animals were part of the same world for the best odds of winning the challenge.
For that, I don't think Dave and Richard should have gone home because despite their combination not being the strongest, their world was the most compelling and easy to understand of the three teams that did not win the challenge, and I'd say that it was even better than Zack and Wayne's environment, because their creature got lost a bit in theirs, too. There is certainly more that could have been done in terms of merging the coral more visibly with the penguin, like perhaps changing the color of the white on the belly and maybe adding more color down the back or on the wings, but shoulda-coulda-woulda, everyone seemed to struggle an equal amount that was not in the top two.
So then if they're all equally not up to par with the challenge, what do you do? Talk with the producers, and ask for an additional episode, they have a book full of challenges, they can easily add one more, it's just a matter of budget. If you're successful in that, then take Mark and Steven's golden brick, and nobody goes home. If you're not, you still take the golden brick and resort to report cards, which would have resulted in sending Michelle and Natalie home with their number of wins to losses and being in the middle, followed by Mark and Steven with the next worst ratio, putting Dave and Richard in what would have been considered the middle of the pack.
Oh well, too late, months too late in fact, can't fight for it any more than just explaining how I think what was done was wrong, and hoping for better things in Season 3, should it happen.
@TeraMedia:
I don’t buy that for a second. They were commenting on how hard it would be to combine the giraffe and jellyfish, because they were of such different scale. These are supposed to be totally new creatures, so scale becomes irrelevant. You can’t tell from their final build of the result is the size of an average giraffe (rather large), or the size of an average jellyfish (rather small). The only critical issue is how the physical structures match up. If one team was left trying to combine a snake and an eel, and one was twice as thick as the other, it’d be tough short of making the thin one come out of the mouth of the other.
For the penguin, they could have built a ton of corral polyps to cover the entire body, they could have changed all the black to match the coral colors, or they could have made tiny penguin heads to put in the existing coral with a giant coral tube to put the existing penguin head on. You just have to be creative about meeting the states requirements of the challenge, and not taking your build off on too great a tangent.
As for coral being many creatures, so is a Portuguese man o’ war, but many people think it’s a jellyfish because it looks like one. Besides, new life form. The old rules don’t apply. It’s not supposed to be a penguin with coral stuck to its head. It’s supposed to be something completely different that just looks like a penguin and coral had a mutant baby.
@Sethro3:
I feel the critiques are usually more consistent than this round was. For one thing, if one team gets a negative assessment when the Judges do their rounds, and they ignore the advice, except in rare cases where the advice turns out to be obviously wrong (e.g. “don’t get too ambitious”, but then they knock it out of the park), it almost always comes back to bite that team. At best, there’s a strong chance they end up in the bottom two, and at worst they’re the one that gets sent packing. When teams revise their strategy based on the critique, they tend to fare better.
But this round, it sounded like the winners were at risk of being sent home based on Jamie’s comment on their earthy color scheme.
I think the crucial part of this challenge was to combine the two builds to create a new creature that really stood out and wowed. Which is why this build lost, because it didn’t stand out. It looked too much like a penguin and was the model that deserved to go home. The giraffe and jellyfish was the second weakest model in my opinion, but it at least looked like a mashup of creatures, whereas the penguin looked like a penguin, and the coral wasn’t noticeable. I do agree with others that the coral is what really made it challenging. On its own it was uninteresting and really not that great on a technical level either.
@monkyby87:
The coral looked pretty cool by itself. The tube structures had some really nice sculpting to them so they didn’t look cookie-cutter-ish. But aside from making them unrealistically bright to appeal to Jamie, coral just don’t seem like a very dynamic option. Plus he just built the tubes, which are basically coral spit, and didn’t make the actual polyps extending out of them to feed. Nice sculpt, but it looked like something you’d drop in a freshwater tank for decoration.
I still don't understand the drama and emphasis the show, and fans, put on how many challenges a team's won. Winning or losing challenges don't have any bearing on your current build, which is the only thing that determines whether you go home or not. (Yes, there is a mythical golden brick that could be useful to have, but it hasn't had any effect in the US seasons other than providing trash talk sound bites.)
I get that winning challenges is a sign of your overall talents as a builder, but one bad day is all it takes to get sent home, no different than a team that's on the bottom.
EDIT: Didn't intend for this post to sound so negative. Dave & Richard were probably my 2nd favorite team, so I'm sorry to see them go. And yes, like everyone else watching at home, I saw a penguin.