Welcome to another BrickCon 2022 recap! What’s BrickCon you ask? You could read my article from last year but to quickly summarize, BrickCon is a truly massive and fantastic LEGO convention held right smack dab in Seattle Center in the lovely pine tree and bald-eagle-ridden state of Washington.

SPAAAACE… Visitors to BrickCon this year would have run into this fantastic SHIP MOC by Wayne Hussey near the door. (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

It has all the usual bells and whistles of a US con, including MOCs on display (of every size/type/genre you can imagine), games (like master builder, blind build, build in a bag, etc.), presentations, awards, two days of setup/AFOL-only fun, two days of public ticketed attendance, Beyond the Brick interviews, and so much more.

BrickCon in Brief

There are two flavors of cons with respect to how MOCs are organized and displayed, and BrickCon is of the ilk that prefers to organize the MOCs by theme as opposed to LUG. The themes got an overhaul this year to simplify some sprawl but it’s still pretty similar to before.

Games were played, look how much fun was had!! (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

Another perk which has been relatively commonplace in the cons I’ve attended in the last couple years is the participation from US LEGO Masters TV show contestants—they were flitting around all over the place bringing energy and cheer wherever they went!

The lovable LEGO Masters scamps all in one place! (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

Let’s see, what else should I remark upon regarding this particular BrickCon… I’d say the trophies were really special as usual, perhaps even better if that's possible. There were many mighty oohs and aahs as the awards presentation took place, just as much I think for the trophies as for the builds they were awarded to! Check out the guest article posted yesterday by Kyle Keller to get an insider look at trophies from a prolific creator.

TROPHIES! … Hey stop drooling people, it’s unbecoming! (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

A hard-to-miss highlight was the Battle Bricks ring of doom (not sure what they called it actually), which ran in full force, lots of delightful mayhem ensued to the hearty applause and cheering of the crowd! (You can learn all about them from fellow BrickNerd Will Fong in his series on how to build fighting LEGO robots.)

GO DESTROY, MY PRECIOUS! (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

Another real high note for me was the keynote address given by Angus MacLane, none other than the director of Pixar’s film Lightyear and himself an avid fan of LEGO and a many-time attendee of BrickCon. I loved the speech where he introduced us to his SUCCS method (ask him not me) and there’s a really neat personal side story about the presentation I’ll tell you a little later in the article so sit tight.

So my MOC SUCCS? Your MOC also SUCCS? Oh this is fun :) (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

I should also remark upon how (just like last year) BrickCon continued the tradition of hosting a virtual convention in parallel with the in-person con. This is pretty unique for cons as far as I know and is a neat way for those who either couldn’t travel or had last-minute logistical snafus, or perhaps are health conscious and can’t join even if they wanted… or just for people who wanted to drop in for a bit virtually to enjoy some of the fun that way! Lots of aspects of the con were shared in real-time like the AFOL gatherings (opening ceremonies, etc.) and live tours and more. There were virtual games similar to those in person and a virtual MOC exhibition. And I imagine a lot of people got some real fun out of being able to join that way!

As for the size of the con, I was surprised that the publicly shared numbers seem to indicate that in 2022, Bricks Cascade in Portland was larger by the total number of AFOL attendees than BrickCon (great to see our Portland neighbors growing so fast)—which to my knowledge is a first but could be due to the limited size of BrickCon’s space. That won’t be a problem next year as BrickCon is moving to a new, bigger location in Bellevue next year. No matter the numbers, BrickCon was packed with 500 amazing builders and crowds of LEGO lovers.

So of course you all hit the link above to re-read my article from last year and you read how it was great to get back to LEGO con-ning in Seattle, but last year’s show was still impacted by COVID in various ways. So for this year, despite my own personal choice to mask up during public con hours and in big gatherings in the theater… I really felt 2022 was finally mostly back to “normal” in that people didn’t have additional logistical issues to deal with and I think we all felt reasonably safe. So hooray!

Yup you spotted it, that’s Wayne Tyler’s National Mall build (well a chunk of it anyway) (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

That said, my OWN con experience was far from normal. Hence the title of this article, and seriously guys and gals… this year was just a crazy whirlwind for me. Crazy how? Good or bad you wonder—and the answer is most assuredly good, though I have a lot of new grey hairs. My 2022 experience is the subject of the rest of the article, and I assume most of you will happily click away from BrickNerd now… ;) Ok just kidding, you want to hear how things really went? You’re just the best readers ever!

Oh, and before we get going, FYI a lot of the pictures in this article (obviously the good ones) were taken by my pal Geoff Vlcek who was the official con photographer and is crazy talented with a camera.

The Whirlwind Begins

So there are a few things that made my BrickCon experience different this year and that really amped up the epic/crazy. Where to start? The beginning? Ok ugh fine you guys are just so smart.

This year I decided to aim for bringing a BIG MOC. But hey “big” is relative right? I’ve personally stood next to many larger MOCs in my conventioning days (half of em by Pamela Henry and her son Austin, those overachievers), so consider this a personal “big.” Many of you probably have a moment where you took a MOC leap. Maybe you dared to try something with motors for the first time, or maybe you doubled the size of your prior biggest MOC. Whatever it is you did, you were probably a little nervous, a lot excited, and you dug in, kicked your own butt, and made it through to the light at the end of the tunnel which equates to a MOC that you’re just insanely proud to have achieved.

Following me? Ok, so this is that for me. I wanted to create something special and tell a story through motion and sound and lights that had a beginning, middle, and end. I’ve since learned I’m not the first to tell a story with a MOC that way—hard to do “first” with all you creative types lurking out there, yeah YOU! Anyway, here are a couple of examples of such a thing:

The Treasure of the Snake Queen by Richard and Flynn of LEGO Masters fame!
Return of the Jedi Cinema MOC by Miro Dudas (another BrickNerd contributor!)

But… hold on, I seem to have already botched this story because that’s not the beginning, is it? The beginning of this MOC is when I was chatting with my brother Greg and my pal Keith about zeppelins. Zeppelins get some LEGO love, but not really the amount they deserve. (Who’s with us on this?) So that got me thinking of the movie released somewhere in the vicinity of 1930 named ‘Hells Angels’ and created by my last-name-twinsie Howard Hughes.

I knew of this film from reading a biography of Howard Hughes and having seen the movie ‘The Aviator’ about the fascinating man. He was seriously the pioneer of a lot of amazing stuff in the aerospace business which might bore you, but he also made this movie, which to a modern audience is half-cringe, half-snorzies—but it was epic and a really groundbreaking movie for its time.

It focused on World War I and aerial combat—which at that time featured… look you’re not gonna guess this no matter how hard you try… oh you said zeppelins? Ok well fine, yes it was zeppelins… and biplanes! Howard Hughes bought up all the available cameras in Hollywood and a sizeable personal air force worth of biplanes and set out to make an action epic. He succeeded after lots of bumps in the road and truly, the aerial dogfights are still pretty cool (though the story and writing are just not our modern style).

Anyway, once I had this idea in my head. I leapt immediately towards an era-themed build that leaned on the concept of combining the subject with a theater setting.

Yeah no big deal, my paint skillz are on point!

As you can see I wanted something eye-catching and exciting, and already I had this idea that I wanted lots of motion to dazzle the crowd. At some point, I realized that a pretty climactic scene in the movie involves blowing up the zeppelin, and suddenly that’s all I could think about. I started sketching up all sorts of concepts and thinking about how one would blow up a zeppelin in a LEGO build… then the real challenge hit me: how do you do this over and over again so that you can show it at a con? I always start with the assumption that all my builds will get to strut their stuff at one to several cons before they are retired, and that got me thinking. I wanted this to be a story, and I wanted to depict destruction… how could one possibly do this? Well, there’s a perfect precedent in real life: the theater. Open the curtain, all sorts of entertaining things play out, and then the curtain closes to allow the audience to skip the boring bits and magically when the curtain opens again everything is reset and pristine!

Thankfully my buddy Keith up and volunteered to help out which is amazing, and he started in on vehicle design while I did the “boring” stuff of figuring out how you set up a scene like this. He came back with, and I’m not joking, a 1.5 x SHIP-sized zeppelin on his first pass. For those of you who are curious, a SHIP is a seriously huge investment in parts and is a thing lots of crazy AFOLs build every year in SHIPtember (September) and the only real requirement is that it is more than 100 studs long. Keith’s zeppelin was a behemoth!

So my “scene” design suddenly scaled up accordingly. Since you’re asking so nicely: the dimensions of the final build are something like 4’ x 3’ x 4’... so it took up half of my ping pong table, and I need a step stool to get at the top well. Aren’t you happy you were patient and made it back full circle? Now we know why I went “big” this year.

I’m going to pause here and note that I promised our Nerd-in-Chief Dave I’d write up another whole article about the fun process and design of the Hells Angels MOC mechanics… so though I’m getting on a roll, I think you get the idea—this was BIG for me, and the build had a lot of features that I’ve never done before. That is the backdrop of my ambition, but getting back to BrickCon, and how things played out, here is the full story.

Getting Something Big to BrickCon

We (me Keith and Greg) had our email chat regarding the idea in late 2019 which spilled into early 2020, then I got busy with other things. We picked it up in April this year (2022) and it steadily picked up steam with a few fits and starts here and there. You might think starting in April is a lot of lead time for a MOC making its debut in October, but somehow life has a way of requiring time for other things. Though we put in a good effort to make progress, as the BrickCon deadline loomed… the MOC required my most frantic scramble I’ve ever experienced to complete a build before a con. Keith was great and put in some awesome time to design a digital first-pass on the zeppelin, the large bi-plane, and the medium-sized bi-planes, but you know how these things go—he’s on the East coast of the US and I’m on the West, so we always knew I’d need to do the build in real bricks and that I’d figure out all the wonky mechanisms, etc…

So imagine, if you will, the scramble which also included my mother sewing curtains and them arriving just a week before the show (anyone else would never have made the deadline, so kudos Mom!). I finished the literal weekend before BrickCon and took pictures and video probably Monday, then immediately turned around to pack the darn thing up for the con starting Thursday.

The finished product all spiffy for the pictures!

I had this concept to build it modular so I could squeeze it into my wife’s Rav4 SUV, in many “smaller” boxes. Is that smart? I dunno, maybe a giant shipping crate would have been better but renting a van and assuming the build would hold together well in built-form seemed risky. I started disassembly and packing a couple of days in advance but you know how life is… I ended up saving the vast majority for when poor Keith flew in on Wednesday and we packed like demons that night and Thursday morning.

We then somehow proceeded to stuff the boxes and bags and saran wrapped chunks into the car until it was filled literally to the roof, the big poster boards for the base were scraping as we put them in.

I have to say that arriving at BrickCon, I had a wonderful surprise that the theme coordinator Patrick Carr and some helpful pals had cleared a whole table width and taped it off with my nametag on it so that when we arrived we could just get to unpacking. This was so awesome in that we didn’t have to go find the coordinator, or wait for anything, or negotiate with neighbors. So I’m giving a shoutout to Patrick and pals here—you guys ROCK!

The rest of Thursday was a blur. We got a lot of stuff unpacked and the beginnings of the MOC setup. We did what we could with only a couple of breaks at the local watering holes for fortification and then packed it in for the night.

Good progress I can assure you for one day :)

Frenzied Friday

Now we come to Friday. This was a nutty day let me tell you, and why I think all this is worth telling you fine folks. Friday encompassed the following:

Driving my Buzz Lightyear costume down to the hall and determining details for a surprise event coordinating with Dave (who was on BrickCon’s Sr. Staff until he stepped down at the end of this year’s event).
The second half of the Hells Angels MOC setup.
Setting up my five-ish other MOCs.
Playing the Master Builder game.
Dinner with an out-of-town friend who flew in for BrickCon’s free Friends and Family preview night.
Rushing over to the keynote address and donning my costume to partake in the surprise event I just referenced.
The rest of the Keynote.
Friends and Family night where we tested out and ran the build for the first time, then running the show many times to passersby while trying to get a few minutes in to walk the floor with some friends and family… and finally, getting drinks with our out-of-town friend.

So, you tell me… like seriously, why did I sign up for all that in one day?? Well, it just happens that it all was too good to pass up, and the Buzz Lightyear thing (which I’ll explain presently) was one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities/the-planets-aligned type things.

I think most of what I listed just now is pretty self-explanatory, except maybe that the Master Builder game was really fun and involved building around a Duplo squirrel. You get one set (in this case 3112 Wild Lion) and have to build something different out of it, in addition to the said squirrel. BrickCon’s Master Builder competition is one of the hardest events to win at any convention.

It is a gauntlet with a preliminary judged round, a second judged round, then a public vote of AFOL attendees to determine the winner. More people vote on Master Builder than Best of Show! Here’s my take on it which happily got me to the second round. It’s a momma squirrel with her kiddo!

So let’s talk about the Keynote address. I told you above how much I enjoyed Angus’ speech, but I had to (for dramatic timing reasons) leave out my participation in the event until now. For background, I made a very elaborate Buzz Lightyear costume on the order of a decade ago and have had it collecting dust until this year’s Emerald City Comicon or ECCC (actually I wrote an article on ECCC so check it out!). Since the movie ‘Lightyear’ came out within the last year it felt pretty cool to dust the costume off and have some more fun with it.

I think it might have been in a conversation with my fellow BrickNerd contributor Ted Andes that he suggested I wear the costume during BrickCon in some way to surprise Angus with it. Dave took that idea and ran with it, and worked with the BrickCon crew to refine it so that we’d have me actually introduce Angus for his Keynote speech. I’d come out and “surprise” the normal MC of the event Steve while he was reading out a fake introduction. The amazing part is that we got everything staged, and with Dave, my pal Keith (squire-ing to get the costume actually on me), the BrickCon crew, and a super helpful stagehand / the theater crew, the whole thing came off brilliantly. I trudged out to special lights and soaring galactic music and popped up to the mike to introduce Angus who was 100% surprised. He then of course had to take a selfie on the stage with Buzz. It was really cool and a moment I will never forget.

Obviously getting ready to send a picture to Star Command. (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

With that memorable experience past us, we next turned to Friends and Family night. I had a number of friends and family joining so we gathered them up and rolled on to the back of the hall where my Hells Angels MOC resided. The Mindstorms bricks had to be turned on, the curtains closed, and everything set up just right. After quite a lengthy build-up of suspense, I finally had things ready to go and the crowd gathered in. Keith and I crossed our fingers and I pulled the trigger. Amazingly it all worked!

My friends and Family… and a few randos who also caught the first show!

If you want to see the show yourself, swing on by my Flickr or YouTube or Instagram accounts or you can watch it below. I have the video on all three so take your pick.

After that point, we learned that when there’s a crowd in the hall and the “show” plays, there forms a pattern as follows: a small crowd forms in front of the build; we try to get them to pack in as tightly as possible so they get a good view; then initiate the show. Over a couple of minutes, a small group starts to build up on the periphery who have been slowly viewing MOCs downstream from the table. When the show is done, the first crowd moves on, and the next queues up while the curtains close, and the sequence resets behind the scenes. I tell a few terrible Doug jokes to fill the time, and then finally it’s ready to go again!

Keith and I running the show. (Photo via BrickCon by Geoff Vlcek.)

This was such a blast, and watching people’s reactions was priceless. It’s funny though because you can get into a groove, and as long as people keep coming you just don’t want to stop the series of shows! FYI at this point, because I had no time to rigorously test out the full sequence at home, I didn’t trust the build to run by itself without me—so I needed to be there to kick it off and be able to stop things if there was a snafu. So I would chat up the crowd in line then start a show and repeat over and over. On Saturday, Keith had to drag me away to get meals—ha! But that’s getting ahead of myself.

With that, and the aforementioned relaxing drinks after the event with friends, the day came to a close. Cue sigh of relief/contentment.

The Public Showings

To be honest, Saturday and Sunday passed relatively quickly and as I alluded to above, I did my best to get to the con at a reasonable time and then set up shop in front of the MOC to play the show repeatedly until I was forced to pause it to eat. It was a blur of many really neat public interactions, and I soaked up all sorts of really kind comments and exclamations from kids and adults both. My only regret is that babysitting my MOC kept me from exploring the hall to witness the wonders of other MOCs for the most part. I got around a bit here and there, but it’s not the same as making time to really pore through the work of your peers. This fed further into my impression of a whirlwind con—I have never had so little time to peruse MOCs. Ah well, you can’t have it all can you?

But I will share an album here of some of the many fun MOCs at the show that I got to see. Sorry, we can’t get you pictures of most of the MOCs, but at least you get a taste! And you can thank my wife’s iPhone for screwing up the file format in uploading to Google photos so I can’t share all her great pictures—darn you, Apple!

It was a banner year, I think—just top notch stuff all around.

Teardown

Alrighty, let’s wind down on the story of my experience. The last hurdle was MOC teardown. As typical for a con, after the public are booted out on Sunday, the entire hall erupts in frantic activity to get some progress made before the closing ceremonies. I got a few things started with my pal James and then we had to pause for the ceremony. After that closed out, we headed back and dove into the fray. Between James, another great friend Larry, and finally my wife who got there about mid-stream, we wrestled this thing into submission. (THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU guys, that was so darn helpful.) Keith suspiciously had to fly out Saturday night so wasn’t there for the packing up on Sunday—hmmmm coincidence? ;) Anyway, despite all the help, I’d say we were one of the last two or three MOCs to be finished and packed out of the hall.

Lessons Learned

Now you’ve heard the tale of Doug’s wild BrickCon! Personally, I think this is a good time to reflect and see if there are any lessons to be gleaned from the experience.

First and most obvious are the ones regarding bringing a giant MOC with lots of setup. It goes without saying, but boy, it would have been nice to complete the build earlier and have time for testing, troubleshooting, and planning for the show. AND it would have been nice to use some of that time for testing out packing certain elements and making any needed tweaks to the build (perhaps that’s too ambitious though…I doubt I’d have really done much packing practice, to be honest).

In regards to finishing on time for such activities, I hate to suggest this as it starts to feel like a work thing… but I probably should have mapped out the major aspects of the build on a schedule and set numerous interim goals to make sure I was really on track overall. I’ve never done that for a build, but hey, I’ve never built this big either.

Figuring out how to wrap the curtain motor mechanism and structural beam in saran wrap.

To expand on that last lesson, I think the bigger you go the more you need to think about transport. Pick a general plan early and build features into your build that enable it. Are you going to put it all in a giant custom crate? Ok maybe go for a solid mono-body design. What steps does it take to tear down the MOC and what steps does it take to build it back up again? This is something I knew was technically feasible but wasn’t sure how tough the steps would be.

I found numerous areas I’ll tweak before the next show to make things go quicker and smoother. An example of that are the curtains. The eyelets are too close to the bottom surface of the plates above them, and that makes it annoying to slide them onto the axles. One more plate of height and I’m good to go! Every minute your design saves you is worth it when you’re stressed out about timing! Are there features you need to build in to locate items or tell which direction something faces? I did some of that thankfully and had a few pictures available to help too which was huge.

Orange 1x1s told me where to put the cloud modules!

Another idea I have is that I should probably have just left my other MOCs at home. It was so much to juggle, and adding in more items to transport and set up piled on unnecessary stress. Plus I felt bad leaving boxes sitting on the other tables until late Friday. It’s ugly and though technically it wasn’t in the way as they were sitting where my builds would go… it’s just not ideal. You could say, hey I should have set them up first, but I actually think that’s a decision I’m quite happy with—that I prioritized setting up the big MOC first to make sure I had the maximum time possible.

The last thing I’ll say is that anyone with an interactive MOC should plan to leave time to spend at the table at your MOC: it's super rewarding to interact with the public. I think that’s pretty straightforward, and believe me, you’ll be happy you did!

Last But Not Least

Ok you didn’t think I’d deprive you of the list of BrickCon People’s Choice and Best of Show awards… did you?

Well have no fear, my friends—here are the big winners to cap off the article. I couldn’t in all good conscience skip these beauties! It sounded like the voting percentage was a bit lower than normal (darn us lazy AFOLs) but what can ya do, we’re busy people. Also, I didn’t get the full list of runners-up, so my apologies for that. Just know that many wonderful MOCs took home some awesome prizes. Congrats to all the winners!

Peoples’ Choice

People's Choice (as voted on by public attendees) was won by Pamela Henry and Austin Henry-Biskup for their MOC “Dreams of a Far-Off Arabia.”

Best of Show

Best of Show (as voted by convention AFOL attendees) was won by Kimberly Giffen for her MOC Giffen Gardens.

And that’s it folks! Thanks for listening to my story about this year’s BrickCon. I imagine a lot of you readers have had similar wild con experiences that felt like you were moving at 110% the whole weekend. We’d love to hear about it if you’d like to share here below in the comments!

What tips do you have for bringing large MOCs to a LEGO convention? Let us know in the comments below.

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