LEGO Masters NZ - Week One

LEGO Masters NZ debuted this week with two non-elimination episodes which, if you're in New Zealand, can be downloaded from the TVNZ website.

This article introduces the six teams following their appearances in the first two episodes. The winning teams from each episode's challenge gained an advantage.

To avoid spoilers for those of you who have yet to watch these episodes, I'll refrain from identifying them until after the break.

Andrew and Georgie

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

David: I'm interested on a couple of questions. I'm interested first of all your comments on SNAAA and SNAP: studs not attached at all and studs not attached properly. A definition of that because that came in through the first episode.

Andrew: Yeah, that was that was my invention if you like. There was all this talk of SNOT and of course SNOT has not been a thing for ever and then in the first episode, we had this little building on top of the island, and we had this technique with some tiles that were lapped onto each other and so you end up with tiles that were not attached or pushed down on the studs.

I thought about second. I thought - SNAP: It's an acronym that's going to take off and being seriously popular.

Georgie: it’s quite ironic because you're doing anything but snapping by having them not attached not attached properly.

Andrew: That was that was SNAP. And later on, we had SNAAA: that's studs not attached at all. There was a variation on that which was SNAATAA in which was studs not actually attached to anything at all. That was as long as I could get it before it got really silly.

That was underneath the arch on that first step we had some little transparent bricks with lights in and here in New Zealand we have these glow-worms that hang down from the caves, and they glow green. And so, we have these green lights under the under the overhang and the way I've done them they were literally just hanging on the wires of the light.

David: And, as Robin Sather said that they might become part of the LEGO lingo lexicon. So, I would like to include them in the article.

David: I was impressed with your Rock Arch Wedding Venue.

Georgie: Thank you.

David: I thought that was an incredibly exciting build with a whole lot of techniques in there that didn't get picked up by Robin as enthusiastically. But I thought it was really, really great to look at

Andrew: Thanks a lot. We got it right into the sculpting. I’m actually a geologist by training, and so I was able to make the wall look a little bit like a real rock which is quite an achievement.

Georgie: Dad focused on that, and I did like the boat and the wedding venue.

David: As the show aired there was a dissuasion online about BURPS which are big, ugly rock pieces. Are we going to see big ugly rock pieces in more of your builds, given that you're a geologist?

Andrew: No, obviously now with this newfound skill that sculpting rock out of individual elements, so I don't need to resort to a precast option.

Georgie: I insisted that dad not use precast stuff because we wanted to make it look as organic as possible. Me being very fussy about aesthetics and stuff. I was like, no, we're not using the precast stuff. I think that actually got in the episode because we had a big discussion about that.

David: For the second episode is your South African Mine with the red man and the flag and the flag and the song and also your expression when it burst forth.

Georgie: Well, the flag I was really happy with. I thought that they captured that really well because I used a technique where we've got a one by two plate and a one-by-one round plate and you sort of put them in the line then you sort of stack them on top of each other, and it creates a curve, and you get a curve in the flag and I thought it looked really effective. In hindsight, I realised that I actually made an error with a couple of them, but hopefully nobody noticed. But because I spent what two hours on it.

We were allowed to Google stuff at the start of the episode, like to research and things and I knew it has these colours, but which order do we put them on? Because obviously, if I did it wrong, I would be the ultimate meme, and probably offend a lot of people. I definitely didn’t want to do that, so I just came up with this little song because I quite often make up songs to remember things.

I’ve done it with what the pi numbers and stuff like that like. And so, this sort of song came about, and then I was all again, let's just sing it when Robin asked us about it. And don't let it go on television. So that was it . . .

David: Another question that came through on one of the online forums while we were watching the show was do you guys have access to the Internet, so you can source images to help you design your builds?

Andrew: Yes, we do. Because they are only halfway through because that was build was ten hours, filmed five hours on one day and five hours on another day. So, you can do what you like in the evening.

David: But you don’t have access on set.

Andrew: Oh, no,

Georgie: It was actually like the Wi-Fi and the data and everything on set was cut out. I don't think that was intentional. But as soon as you've got onto set it all dropped off.

David: So, in the middle, you had an intermission where you went home and caught up with each other and designed the next day's work?

Georgie: Kind of, but to be honest, when we got back the last thing, we wanted to do was see another LEGO brick. If we did, if we did have something we wanted to like plan or whatever, then yes, of course we would Google it or whatever. But I mean Dad and I went for runs. We got curry. So that was about it. I've watched a lot

Andrew: Robin was on the radio the other day, talking about exactly that issue. He said, “You know, obviously the builds are spread over several days or a couple of days.” And he said, “And therefore everybody was doing a bit of research in the evening and quite often, they would come back in and change the style of their builds or use other elements.” And that's exactly what we did on the South African build. I mean, I knew about diamond mines and that was pretty much it.

David: Talk to me about the big red man because I don't think Robin picked up on that and as in his feedback on the show.

Georgie: Yeah, well, that was when we basically Googled South African icons we came up with this red man and wasn't it made out of like Coca-Cola crates or something like that.

Andrew: It’s made out of Coke crates, and it’s on the wharf in Cape Town, and it's absolutely massive. It's a huge thing. Sculpture and of course being made out of Coke creates it’s absolutely ideal for modelling out of LEGO.

Georgie: It took like 10 minutes to build that.

Andrew: So, we put that together, and we had Protea flowers; we had the Springbok; we had Table Mountain but when we first got South Africa, we were what do we know about this country?

David: Well, thanks a lot for your time and good luck with the rest of the show.

Andrew and Georgie: Thank you very much.

EMILY AND LIAM

FLATMATES

David: On the first episode you had to Dinosaur Day Out. Tell us about that

Liam: Everything we build is very heavily inspired by pop culture and me and Emily grew up on movies like Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, that sort of stuff and that heavily influences what we build. So, I think building our own personal Dinosaur Park sort of was a bit of a given.

David: What drove you towards a dinosaur-themed build for that particular episode because the criteria was a kiwi tourist destination.

Liam: I think we sort of took it as a destination where Kiwis would like to go. We don't really get much over here in New Zealand we get kiwis and tuataras and that’s about it. We get the odd dolphin here are there. But what do Kiwis want, they want to see something exciting and new: why not dinosaurs.

Emily: Herbivores.

Liam: Herbivores not carnivores.

David: I didn't actually pick that up on your build, but they're all herbivore dinosaurs?

Liam: Herbivores, we kept it family-friendly.

Emily: There were two quite large dinosaurs that they didn't really show them. Obviously, you saw the smaller ones but, yeah, so it was just like a big family-friendly dinosaur park where no one tries to eat you.

Liam: We've learned from history that having carnivorous dinosaurs in theme parks isn't a great idea.

David: From Jurassic World and so on.

Liam: Pretty much everything that relates to dinosaurs.

David: They're going to sit in the grandstand but then get chomped on for dinner.

David: On the second episode was the cricket-themed build where you had a cricket ball that was fired out by the cannon, and you randomly selected Canada as a country to represent. I didn't realise Canada was a particularly big cricket country until I learned on that episode that the first international cricket match was between them in the USA and Canada won.

Liam: I think we all learned that together.

David: Yes, we all did, actually. Talk to me about that episode.

Liam: I think we got a lot of pressure being getting Canada unfortunately, with having a Canadian judge I think it definitely put us into a bit of an awkward spot.

Emily: Yeah.

David: What was it you built? You had like a maple syrup mine was some Mounted Police and stuff to talk to me about that one.

Liam: We thought because Canadians are always so well-mannered and welcoming, that a Canadian welcome centre would be the perfect thing. And we're welcoming Robin to New Zealand, and he's welcoming us into his show.

David: How have you got on with Robin, and what have you thought of his interactions with the teams up until the second episode?

Liam: Robin and Dai are both great hosts.

David: Had you heard of him? Did you know about him before this show?

Liam: I knew of him but probably not as much as I knew about Ryan McNaught (Brickman). Probably because we're so heavily following the Australian LEGO Masters as opposed to the international stuff.

David: Do you think he was a good fit for the New Zealand show?

Liam: Robin and Dai seem to vibe really well. So, I think he's a good match.

David: Is there anything else you'd like to sort of? Comment on that might have forgotten and missed on that your first two builds?

Emily: The style that we build, and the scale that we go to. There are a lot of stories, and it's obviously difficult to show them in a short period of time on the television. So, I guess people can see them on social media.

Liam: Because you're trying to compress hundreds of hours of footage into forty-five. minutes. So much is going to get lost by the wayside. Yes. So, we've been posting things in our own social media system if people want to have real close up looks because me and Emily build at minifig scale, so you really lose a lot of that on camera, unfortunately.

David: I'd agree with that too. And in a still shot that you can actually sit and appreciate it for a short while, rather than as a camera just pans through to make a scene.

David: Well, it's been great to catch up with you guys. Good luck for the next few episodes.

Emily and Liam: Thank you. Bye.

GLENN AND JAKE

LEGO MATES

David: After the first show you had the amazing Rescue Zoo. Talk to me about that first build.

Jake: So, we started out with all sorts of crazy ideas, and they were just a little bit too complicated. And then, and we're getting a bit worried that we're spending too much time on the idea and then Glenn said, “what about Zoo?” Well people love animals and there's all these animals in the Brick Pit and so that's not a bad idea. When did we get the idea for the monorail and the tower Glen? I can't exactly remember.

Glenn: That was fairly early on. We decided that we needed to be quite tall. We were talking about how people would actually view it without walking in amongst the animals. We talked about putting a stairway through the middle and that kind of work.

Jake: The trouble was that it was a 100 by 100 space, but it's actually not that much space if you want to have some decent sized animal enclosures and putting pedestrian areas all the way through the island from down where the boat would arrive at the top would just eat up too much space. So, the idea of the monorail and tower, well the tower was to give it height and then the monorail was to try and solve the problem of how people would see animals.

David: Talk to me about time management. How did that affect you? How did you manage your time?

Glenn: We were pretty good. When we're going into the first episode, there was a lot of unknowns and one of them was the time management, but we pretty much nailed it Jake?

Jake: Yes, we did. We had this tactic of a whole concentrate on getting them the mechanisms working and quite early on so that we're not stressing about that at the last minute, and we were stressing it, but we didn't know how fast the time would go. And pretty early on, Glenn got the island shaped up, and we came up with the idea of using window frames to build internal structure quickly, and you were concentrating on that and then yeah, it went pretty well. We were just making progress. We hit things we knew we wanted to achieve, and we just made sure we're tracking towards them. And we were getting nearly finished with an hour to go, and I was wondering what to do next. Do you want to talk about that, Glenn?

Glenn: Yeah. This didn't make the cut. Jake decided with an hour to go he was going to make a helicopter, and he gave it a good shot and didn't quite get there. And there was quite a bit of banter in our interviews about it. But you know, none of that made the cut.

Jake: I've done it myself within an hour and I thought well it'd be great to have like a helicopter flying and carrying an elephant, but the rotor on the helicopter has to go around and of course their elephant has to be hanging under the helicopter, and so I had this idea of building it on an arm that I'd mount on the top of the tower and then have the motor actually hidden on the top of the tower. And I gave it a crank I got the rotor working and everything and I started to shape up the actual body of the helicopter, but it was just looking a little bit shoddy compared to the rest of the model.

Glenn: One of the things we had to balance was aesthetics versus function: putting something in that's working is great, but if it doesn't look good, it's sort of distracting from the build.

Jake: And when I realised it wouldn't look any good, I finally listened to Glenn’s voice of reason and just ditched it.

David: The second episode was the Guarding England's Finest Tea where the machine fired a cricket ball through a soldier in London. Talk to me about that one.

Glenn: One of the things we decided quite early on was we wanted to include the cricket ball into the story. So, the fact that the guy was actually diving out and trying to stop the ball we thought was quite a critical idea.

Jake: The original idea when we thought of England, and we thought of football, and it made probably thinking of a Hand of God saving a goal. I was thinking about other literally a football player in front of the goal. There are lots of countries that play football. I was thinking well, what's uniquely England and for some reason, tea came into my head.

Glenn: We like to bounce ideas off each other. Yeah. We had a policy going on in that there are no bad ideas. We're just going to talk through them to see if they’re plausible or not. So one of us would come up with an idea, and we're just bouncing back and forth and sip of work. We would make a list of maybe five or six things and then pick the one we liked the best and run with it and remember this had been our second go at it. I think it was a bit of a combination of a few different ideas wasn’t it, Jake?

Jake: Yeah, we would realise after the first episode that big character stuff that can be recognised from ten meters away was really important to Robin. So, we realised that there has to be something big, you know, but because it was being smashed, we didn't want to smash someone recognizable, like putting the Queen up there was probably be not a good look. And you could have something like a big crown. But a crown object is not a character.

Glenn: And doesn't really scream England either.

Jake: But anyway, I've got I'm quite pleased where we ended up.

David: I like the little Corgi dog that was a corgi dog under the arm.

Glenn: We got a lot of feedback that everyone was quite happy that he survived.

Jake: There was a discussion about where the corgi should go. Was he was just observing from the floor or right in the heart of the action?

Glenn: We actually place him right where the ball was supposed to hit.

David: On the Australian version of the show, they focused on the planning: they came around, and they might have had a digital iPad. And people were creating a concept for some time before they raced off into the Brick Pit. Maybe you guys did that, or maybe you didn't but the way that it was edited on the show, it looked like everyone raced off to the Brick Pit to get their bricks before they thought about what they were going to build. Can you talk to me about that? What you went through to plan your builds before you raced off?

Glenn: We definitely sat down and drew up some ideas and wrote some stuff down. But they’ve got hundreds of hours of footage to squeeze into forty-five minutes covering six teams. There's only so much that they can fit in, but there was definitely a lot of planning.

Jake: Sometimes the idea would come straight away, and sometimes it struggled a little bit more on episode one it took us a while to settle into an idea of this at least half an hour to forty minutes. I think in episode two it might have been a little bit quicker.

Glenn: Yeah, the concept of the guy diving was the basic idea we came up with, and it probably took about twenty minutes to develop that into what we decided to build.

Jake: And then I sketch up a drawing, and then we could kind of scale off as well and do some measurements of where the cricket ball was going to hit and how big everything needs to be.

David: That's another question here. Did you have a range-finding? Was there a period of time when you fired off cricket balls, and you could see where it was going to hit.

Glenn: We were given a measurement that should hit at this height, and it will be centred on the build. There was a little bit of deflection with some of them and some of them weren't quite right. Some of them were spot on like the kangaroo. I think ours was it was a little bit off. It didn't quite hit where it was going to.

Jake: It was interesting how it looked in the end. I figured the ball was going to go straight through the middle of his body a little but below the corgi but somehow his torso which was the delicate including little cucumber sandwiches and jam and cream scones, but somehow it managed to survive. So I have to watch it again to see exactly what happened. Possibly. It was a bit high. And maybe the Corgi deflected the ball, actually.

Glenn: It looked like it went straight through his face.

David: Have you got anything else that you might like to share?

Jake: It's a great experience, obviously reliving it again on screen. I'm really enjoying watching the show.

Glenn: I was quite happy with the edit and I found it quite watchable. There was quite a lot of humour and banter that went on it didn't quite make it to the cut. Yeah. I and I felt like maybe they were just playing it a little bit safe for the family entertainment, so I don't know what the threshold is for that stuff.

David: Thanks a lot for your time.

Glenn and Jake: Thanks a lot.

AMY AND ADAM

MARRIED COUPLE

David: In the first episode you did the Club Croc with the opening mouth and the crocodile raft. Describe the crocodile raft that was in the water?

Amy: So the idea behind it was a crocodile drawn chariot.

Adam: We kind of had the idea that this was going to be a top tier of destination. So, the kind of people that were going to go would be people with a lot of money. So that mode of transportation had to be exclusive. It's the kind of thing that you'd imagine billionaires would be going on. So there was a lot of white with gold trim. That was the look that we were going for.

David: Were you pleased with the crocodile?

Adam: Yeah, but it's one of those things that it takes so long and there's so many little problems that you overcome but, by the time you get to the end, you almost hate it a little bit, just because of all the stress that it's put you through.

Amy: But I think the problem with that was getting so much detail and something that's big, but then having the motor that can still lift it, so it was quite fragile.

Adam: That was the problem when you've got a motor moving something, it kind of scaled exponentially the more weight you put on. So having a heavy, I could only just get that motor to get it to go up and down, and I was constantly thinking this has to be as light as possible. When it's as light as possible, that means it's as flimsy as possible so every little thing I put on it which could collapse itself because it was hollow.

David: A constant compromise?

Adam: Yeah, exactly. I'm thinking oh, so this would make it look more crocodilish. But it would also add a little bit of weight.

David: I was watching it online, on one of the New Zealand Facebook Groups and everyone was particularly impressed with the crocodile and the teeth. Those teeth were pretty random. Crocodile teeth are not nice and neat dental and orthodontic, and you think you've captured that. Deliberately or not.

Adam: Some of that was deliberate. One of the things that you didn't notice: the teeth sat really well in the bottom row but in the top, the way it attached them was really precarious so they were constantly falling out. It probably look quite neat at the start, but by the time I've put back in for the 100th time I’m just shoving them in anywhere.

David: In one of my earlier interviews this evening was I was talking to Andrew and Georgie, and they created this term studs not attached at all and studs not attached properly, and I think you might have had a few teeth not attached at all, so you might be able to come up with an acronym for that one.

David: In Episode Two you built the kangaroo on the beach. And that was I was impressed. I

Adam: I thought I hated that crocodile. That was nothing on how much I hated that kangaroo.

David: Is there an ANZAC sort of love-hate relationship going on there.

Amy: No. We had so much fun with it.

Adam: It was just a great opportunity.

Amy: We were really lucky with our draw because we could go to town. There weren't so many things that we could turn really offended with.

Adam: Yeah, it was good. I felt I felt sorry for some of the teams in that episode. Because that draw really did, you know, there was a lot of luck there. You know the difference? I'd say New Zealand, Australia and England; Anybody would have been happy to get it, that’s quite easy. Whereas South Africa and Canada and India. You know, there were always two tiers and there was a big gulf between them.

David: Yes. Yeah, I agree. I mean, anything you can produce a barbecue with prawns and . . .

Adam: we had so many options.

David: And even cheeky: a cricket ball with sandpaper?

Adam: Well, that was a necessity,

David: As it was shown on TV, I posted on this Facebook Group, “I hope they fire off the cricket ball, so it rolls along the floor.”

Amy: And I don't know if it's the same chat group, but I was seeing comments like that type of support, and I'm thinking, “yeah.”

David: And then Dai Henwood actually brought that up as part of the part of his commentary. And also wearing the beige cricket outfit.

Adam: It was great.

David: Yeah, it was really good. Okay. I'm a little uncertain. You won the second episode. And I think a little bit of the feedback that's coming through from the Lego fans is that the benefits of the wins hasn't really been defined through the editing on the shows. So there's this power brick, that gives the team immunity for Episode One, but what did you win for Episode Two? Are you allowed to reveal that?

Adam: We can't reveal that not revealed at the start of the next episode, but I think that is intentional suspense in a way? So they say, “you've won an advantage, but you don't know what the advantages could be.” We didn't know. We didn't know what advantage we had until we started Episode Three. That was part of the introduction. They introduced the challenge and said, right, well, you’ve won . . . here's what your advantage is.

David: Yeah, I'll wait till Episode Three. Because sitting on the side-lines, I have no idea what you got from it, and it wasn't explicitly said.

David: Give me some insight onto sort of the feeling and the whole of that studio with twelve of New Zealand's passionate LEGO builders.

Amy: It was a very, very cool, very happy place to be. We all got on really well. Like just the sharing everything, you know, we’d be in the Brick Pit unable to find something and someone else who jumped in and said, “Oh, it's over here.” Because it is a competition, it was friendly than I ever expected.

Adam: You weren't so much competing against other people. Like they never felt like the enemy. It was more you're on a journey together that everybody wants to everybody else just do the best that they can do. And because we got on so well with them off set, it was just it was just like having a party.

Amy: Yeah, there was a fair bit of banter between the tables that probably don't show that.

David: Is there anything else you want to share?

Amy: I was going to say one thing that probably didn't come across on camera with the kangaroo was that the kangaroo itself was so labour-intensive that I had to build everything else. It was quite intensive: Adam was doing the very tricky kangaroo, and I was speed building everything else.

Adam: Honestly. I did not intend for that to take the entire episode to do. I thought I would knock together this kangaroo, and then I'll be able to work on some of the fun stuff around it. That took 100% of my time and Amy did everything else.

Amy: A very steep learning curve for me is I’m probably being the underdog of the team.

David: Well, I it was I've got to say the kangaroo on the beach. It was it was a build from what I saw on TV and I hope to get some still photos to support my article. It was unambiguous. It was an Australian kangaroo on a Queensland beach perhaps with a Barbie on the side and every Australiana that you can possibly hang off the neck of that rodent.

Amy: Fun Fact to include: we actually named him after a good friend of ours who was looking after our kids while we were on the show. The Kangaroo is called Shano.

David: Hopefully we don't talk so soon. Good luck and everything.

Amy and Adam: Thank you very much.

JONO AND DAN

BRICK BUDDIES

David: The Kiwiana Theme Park, which was part of the key tourist destination build. Talk me through that one.

Dan: Well somebody came up with a brilliant idea. For the record, I'm pointing at Jono, to do a roller coaster.

Jono: Yeah, that was brilliant. It was a brilliant idea.

Dan: No, we all know how notoriously bad roller coasters are.

Jono: It was brilliant. The idea was amazing. If the execution had been successful then we would have won. That's what the crowds are telling me.

Dan: It would have. That's right. We knew that roller coasters were notoriously risky. And seriously, we thought oh, we might as well just jump into this, boots and all, and we'll give it a crack. So, we decided pretty early on I think that we were going to do a Kiwiana Theme Park because we wanted to represent New Zealand.

Jono: That was one of the things that we spoke about early on that together was that none of the other LEGO masters really have showcased their culture. And that was one of the things that we were completely proud of the fact that we come from New Zealand and you know, it's like we always show New Zealand off.

David: When it comes to your build though the criteria at the start was a kiwi tourist destination and I think your build actually was the closest display that meet that criterion: there was a Dinosaur Day Out there was some other stuff, but your one was actually the was the one that really took the Kiwi tourist destination thing.

Jono: We failed in the technical ability category. So, whilst we might have had it in stones in one area, you've got to get across all the boxes that Robin is ticking, and he has a system. He's a very methodical, very calculated man. And he's got a system. We weren’t privy to the system. I'm in no way disappointed with the results of Episode One. Had we succeeded with the roller coaster? It might have been a different story, but we didn't. So, it is what it is.

Dan: It’s important to clarify, though, that it didn't have to be a kiwi destination. It just had to be a tourist destination.

Jono: So, Robin was encouraging us to be as creative and thoughtful and imaginative as possible. And if I'm completely honest with you, five of the teams in that room, played it safe with their ideas. And one of the teams went over and above and beyond and they smashed it from across the room. You could see exactly what it was from across the room. There was no question.

Dan: Yeah, that was the point five teams went very literal. One team went out of the box.

Jono: And they and they deserve it. One of the things that we were given when we first came into the show, we were given a series of criteria that we were to be judged on because they need to inform us. And one of those things was the ten-three-one: Robin wanted to see it from ten metres, see what the story was straightaway; come into three meters, get a bit more detail on the story; come into one meter and get the Easter eggs you know and by that criteria, Sarah and Emily had that in spades and nobody else really did.

David: I hadn't actually heard of that sort of that ten-three-one concept, but it does actually make sense.

Jono: Well Robin does mention it in the second episode. He talks about it quite specifically in the second episode.

Dan: He says you nailed the ten-thirty-one was in regards to the kangaroo build. I think it was.

Jono: So and they did.

David: That was pretty epic. The kangaroo. There was no doubt that it was.

Dan: And the ball couldn't have hurt in a better spot. They couldn't have scripted that.

Jono: The only thing in that episode besides the hitting the budgie smugglers was probably Robin's line about the beavers.

David: Yes. That was commented on Facebook. Were you able to with the cricket ball cannon, Trent, that was named after the cricketer?

Jono: Yeah. It was named after a New Zealand bowler.

David: Were you able to calibrate. Did you have some test shots to work out where this thing would shoot?

Jono: No, they had we didn't have test shots.

Dan: But they did calibrate the machine and there was a margin of error of sort of two inches in either direction. So, unfortunately, our one was probably slightly too low. And that was probably our fault because we had our we did our measurements.

Jono: Thirty centimetres from the tabletop was the point we were given.

David: What you saw was this sheep been splattered gunned and the kiwifruit sort of like Humpty Dumpty rolling off the side, which was pretty cool.

Jono: We were hoping it would have been much taller. Yeah. And that would have been quite ridiculous.

David: And then you would have seen the kiwi fruit slices.

Jono: We were so keen on that. I really wanted to see those.

David: Talk to him about the silver fern flag. I thought that was pretty epic.

Jono: Thank you. That was Robin came up to us and said we don't have the colours black and silver in our build. And then Dan goes a flag, and I'm like, Oh, okay. And I kind of quickly smashed something together, and it was pretty substandard. And Dan said you could do better mate. So, I wandered into the Brick Pit, and I was just looking for some stuff that was silver. And I just I went in as soon as I saw the scissors and I saw the swords, and I was like they're all varying lengths. And then thought here we go. And I went back to the table and I just did the thing on the thing. And Dan was like, Oh man, and so yeah. It was one of the beautiful things about the Brick Pit was that when you were lost or when you needed inspiration or when you kind of walked in there with a thought, and you found a part and then it just you know does when you build when you notice is that one thing you get the theme part and that's all you need. And next minute you're running away, and you've created something.

David: Then you're surrounded by so much variety that you'd sort of have a right there and already sorted with so much stimulation and 1000s or 1000s of them.

Jono: But you know, I knew that I needed to use black and silver, so I went looking in the Brick Pit for black and silver that would suit the purpose.

David: What do you think of the production? Is it up to your standards? Is LEGO Masters New Zealand on par with what we've seen overseas? LEGO Masters Australia and USA as a comparison?

Dan: My biggest concern with LEGO Masters in New Zealand was the production value and whether it was going to look like it was going to be substandard by comparison to the rest of the world. And I was definitely more than happy with the production quality. The day we walked onto the set, and you could see that they had put as much effort into the set as everyone else. The Pit looked amazing the set looked amazing. The camera guys were all extremely professional. The sound guys were amazing. Everything about the production was at the highest standard that I think we could have expected. And I think the thing that really stuck out for me was when we did our builds the amount of attention that the camera guys put into making sure that they got all the shots that they wanted. It just showed that they were really invested in making it the best production possible. And it's you know to be fair, it's just a shame. It's a one-hour show, you could easily have a three-hour show every week if you really wanted too much footage.

Jono: Going on from what Dan's just said then, one thing I will say about the crew is that the majority of them all had some sort of affinity for LEGO. I mean the two women that were chiefly responsible for the execution of LEGO Masters New Zealand in the first place have been fighting for the last four years. Alex the technical genius art department wizard who created the suspended brick and all the technical stuff you see throughout the show was amazing. Her partner in the production was equally as important but these guys were so crucial for the fact that New Zealand LEGO Masters actually exists. It wouldn't be there without it. And then the first thing about it is that all the people that were there were all like the film crew were the best of the best of the best in New Zealand television production. The way we were treated, the staff liaison, the cast liaison, everybody honestly, there's not a single fault I can say about the crew to cast the production, and anyway they were so reverent. They were so concerned that we got to tell our truth. They were very respectful of our story. And when we had our difficulties throughout the show, they didn't prompt us to get the crew to gritty, nasty, awful details. They asked us kind of how we'd like to be presented or how we'd like you to know, how they need us to kind of lead the story, and they encouraged us entirely to bring out the truth to our builds. And bring ourselves to the table and to just be ourselves and there was a lot of secrecy because of course there's no stuff they can't tell us was what was coming up on the show.

David: You've all been working together for a couple of months.

Jono: It’s so intense and of course, because you're in the job there's only twelve of you on set that is in that position that knows what that feels like everybody else has to keep this secret from you. And so you form a very tight bond very quickly.

David: Best of luck for the next episodes.

Jono and Dan: Thanks, Bye now.

EMILY AND SARAH

MUMS

David: I'm really, really glad that I've caught up with you two because you won the Power Brick on the first episode with your big Yellow Duck. And so, the Rubber Duck Water Park so talk me through that build and what it meant to you guys.

Sarah: The first one we wanted to kick off with a bang. I think any thoughts we had or any plans we had went out the window the minute we realised what the build would be. Wouldn’t you agree Emily? We sort of had all these ideas and they just never like

Emily: It was in the Brick Pit. As soon as we looked in the Brick Pit. It was like, do they have this? No. Do they have this? No. They haven't. Oh, and you don’t have the sort of bricks that you really like. And one of the things was kind of trying to know what are we going to do? And just something that was really different. You learn from all the other LEGO mobs. You're a lot of the things they say is don't build what's already there. You know, if there's already a big rock, don't build a rock, and try to think outside the box. Sarah is very good at thinking outside the box.

David: I'm curious to know with two and a half million bricks, what wasn't there? What were you looking for you that sort of made you pause and re-assess?

Emily: So, a lot of this stuff is duplicated. So, when they're talking about that many bricks, they're talking about a lot of grey. And they're talking about a lot of one sort. So apparently, they're provided by LEGO. So, LEGO kind of give you the basic pack and then the Brick Master can add those. I don't know if all of them arrived we had baby bodies but no baby heads. We were trying to make these babies and realised you can't make babies. like some of the things were we kind of like the water park idea we wanted to have the kind of things on LEGO Friends they haven’t got the slides and those kinds of things, but then they had roller coasters. So, some things you've got heaps of and then other things you don't have lots of. Some of the colours that are our kind of favourite colours like the mid-heather and the kind of the lavender and those kinds of colours. Oh yeah, magenta, magenta is our favourite. Like totally hardly any there and the LEGO Dots, which I’m a massive fan of, and I see one colour mixed in with all the other colours. And there’s only fifty.

David: Does that impact on what you, moving forward, might be designing in the future.

Sarah: Yes, very much. There is a couple of builds, without giving too much away, where we almost had to re-think how we were doing things. So, we sort of redesigned a couple of things, just on the pure fact that there weren’t enough of a particular brick, so you had to rethink how you did that. And that took up time. But I mean, it was a learning curve, and we had to learn we liked building in one colour and that was just something we had to work with. And you just have to accept that if you're building one colour you are having to work with a particular set of bricks and then if you didn't have these bricks, you had to get creative.

Emily: It was really useful as we went along the series because we knew what kind of bricks that were in the Brick Pit the first time you went in, you're like oh my gosh, there's so much here and you were putting everything in your tray. You were just like, “I have to have everything.” And then actually that's very useful. It was still fun. Yeah.

Sarah: I did that right to the end.

David: Your second build with the cricket ball coming out of the cricket ball shotgun called Trent, you had the Indian theme and the banyan tree. That talk to me about that one.

Emily: You want me to talk technically. We were given some useful pointers as to how Trent would operate in terms of the area that he would sort of shoot at and the sort of deflection that there might be and also, thinking about how we would make it really, really weak. Basically, so that it could really be smashed. I mean, you've seen so many smashes on TV, and we did do a practice smash at one point, didn't we? We did one in the face. We were like we're going to practice smashing and see what happens.

Sarah: We did it with a broom handle, not a ball thrower.

Emily: It wasn’t very exciting. But the thing is that actually those kinds of technical watching and studying a lot of them, so one of the things was, you know, separation of colour that you were getting that kind of difference, putting the sort of central divider which was clear in there so that we've got that separation. I really think that those kinds of technical things, the shape of it, and the way that we built, you don't actually see it in the episode, but basically none of those bricks, actually the top is not really connected. It's kind of it was so hard to build because literally anything would have sent it going down and people were thundering past, and you were just like your every brick was only connected at one point. So it wasn't kind of like tied in.

David: You're designing it to explode.

Emily: Deliberately not wanting things to be really safe and secure,

David: Structurally sort of weak so it's going to burst.

Emily: It'd be like an Easter egg. Yeah, when you drag stuff in, and you open it, and it's just like you put the rainbow of colours and so when it exploded, there was really contrasting colours to the green of the tree.

Emily: We asked where the camera was going to be because of course, blue with the front and then yellow and orange behind is a better combination. There's actually slightly more orange so that you see those two colours at the same time because it's blue as the background colour. You wouldn't necessarily see that so much. You know, the orange makes the kind of backdrop in the background. So, we did try and think about camera placement as well. In terms of kind of creating that effect. But you never know how it's going to go.

David: So, they're what you're describing to me is not only where you're doing this build with this tree and all that story and on the ground underneath the tree, but you're actually technically thinking ahead about how this will look once it's filled with cameras from certain angles. So there was a lot of technical component to the final look?

Sarah: Absolutely. I mean, you've got to take a lot into consideration. Even choosing the colours we sort of thought about what colours were exploding out, and it just made the most sense to use the colours from the cricket team as opposed to the colours of India. Because we really wanted to represent that theme as opposed to the country's theme because we went so far down the cricket line. It was really important to us that there was a constant theme throughout because we could have done flags and flag colours, but it wasn't consistent with the whole cricket theme.

Emily: Yeah, we were always a bit concerned about flags and countries and cultural issues. Obviously having India it's, you know, something that we had to be quite sensitive about a lot of the topics that we connect, and we particularly, we very carefully tried to ensure that we that's really why we went down the cricket team as well. Because it tied in with smashing something that's for a country. For me, it is very difficult. And so, I think we achieved it as being kind of a whimsical, cheerful sort of Indian theme but not something that is representing India that if you smashed it would be offensive.

Sarah: Yeah, so that was on the back of their minds a lot. We were very aware of things like the Indian flag. Its three colours of it are green, orange and white. And each represents their national religion and the white represents peace, So it was like couldn't even smash so we could not build it to smash it. The intention was never there to do that because we just could not see how that would be good diplomatically very good.

David: you’d offend the community: there'll be uproar.

Emily: It was a very difficult challenge because, you know, to have a culture, I mean, you can build we could build the loveliest Indian thing, absolutely the most fabulous thing ever. But then to smash it, you know that it was a difficult thing to have to do.

David: There was there were definitely three countries that were easy to create something and yours was in the group of there were the more awkward. The Canadian model was difficult. And I think the South African one was, too. But the New Zealand, Australian and the British ones where you can go full-on and create something that everyone will recognise.

Sarah: Yeah, and I think that's what we really struggle with. This is probably the episode I was most aware of. There's another one coming up as well, where we kind of went through this crisis of conscience and what we were going to do and problem solve and all that, but I think it made us better builders for it. But we definitely went through a lot to get there. It was the ones whereas opposed to the first one we were like oh we’ll build ducks, it's great, but this one was more we're very aware.

David: It was the destruction that caused that.

Sarah: If it was just India, I would love to do those kinds of things, but it was just that smashing but I mean, really, we were really actually to build look really great. It was very Alice in Wonderland. It's kind of Tim Burton, but you know, you don't get a lot of time to see the set because at the back they're all having a crooked tea party. You know, the peacock, dad is making cricket tees. There's so much little detail and everyone's model is the same as well, so, you don't actually get to see in the episode how all the little things and all the little ins and outs. I mean, smashing it as well!

David: I wish you all the best for the future episodes.

Emily and Sarah: Thank you so much.

LEGO Masters NZ

LEGO Masters NZ every Monday and Tuesday at 7:30 pm on TVNZ 2.

5 comments on this article

By AddictedToStyrene in Australia, 15 May 2022 12:03

Great insights and thanks for typing out the whole interview so we get all the character and details. Heroic effort! (Unless you have a transcription app?)

By Huw in United Kingdom, 15 May 2022 12:08

@AddictedToStyrene said:
"Great insights and thanks for typing out the whole interview so we get all the character and details. Heroic effort! (Unless you have a transcription app?)"

We do, but it's still a lot of work to edit it!

By PDelahanty in United States, 15 May 2022 15:33

Consider this the obligatory “Is there anywhere to watch this that doesn’t block international viewers?” post.

By Huw in United Kingdom, 15 May 2022 16:25

@PDelahanty said:
"Consider this the obligatory “Is there anywhere to watch this that doesn’t block international viewers?” post."

Using a VPN and setting your origin as NZ may work.

By Brikkyy13 in Australia, 15 May 2022 22:56

I would really appreciate it if Brickset would cover Aussie LEGO masters, along with all the other countries that have the show that don’t get brought up on here at all.