Best of BrickNerd — Article originally published December 28, 2021.

As promised in the introduction article in November, we're back with a recap of the Brick of Time collaborative project! It’s been a whirlwind month and a half of enjoying the show and posting all our hard work for the world to see (especially for Kevin Wanner taking on the bulk of the builds and the planning/write-ups etc.)!

So before we get into the final list of builds and some stats I figured we’d touch base with Kevin again to answer a few more questions about the endeavor. Keep in mind we’re writing this up assuming you die hard fans have all had a chance to read “Eye of the World” and watch the Amazon TV show Season 1, so there are minor to potentially major spoilers ahead!

THE BELLS ARE RINGING, IT’S TIME TO DIVE IN!

Doug: Hey Kevin, thanks for continuing our discussion from November, it’s been quite a journey! Let’s talk about the collab in general, which you did so much work to plan and execute. As they say, duty is heavier than a mountain. Can you talk a bit about planning the effort and what things stayed the same or changed from the original plan?

Kevin: I wanted to cover the story of “The Eye of the World” and release the MOCs in conjunction with the show. This was difficult to plan, because we didn’t know how much the show would cover, and we didn’t even know when it was coming out. Originally I was looking at 8-12 builds and each person would do 3 or 4. We ended up releasing 20 builds. I had two more that I decided not to release, and one that never got built. One thing that was important to me was accuracy. I read The Eye of the World at least 3 times in addition to going back and rereading a lot of sections. It was a lot of fun and interesting to build based on text rather than a visual medium. This obviously led to some differences between our builds and the show.

Doug: That was tough indeed! If Amazon told us everything about the show before release it wouldn’t have been much of a fun surprise, but it sure would have made your job easier ha! So as you readers have likely noticed, numerous details ended up diverging between the collaboration (mainly based on the books and a few teaser images) and the TV show.

The obvious scenes that were completely cut or merged with other scenes were “Baerlon,” “Whitebridge,” and “The Daughter Heir” (Caemlyn). As for Baerlon the boys meet Thom in a generic town which combined the book scenes from several towns together including Baerlon and Whitebridge. As for Caemlyn the producers decided not to introduce all of those fun characters yet because it’s such a quick cameo and isn’t needed to advance the story, so they held the Logain “parade” in Tar Valon instead. Kevin, can you tell us more about this divergence?

Kevin: There obviously needs to be changes when bringing the story of a book to a tv show. The need to show something rather than have a conversation, the need to condense a 30-hour audiobook to an 8-hour series, or the budget not letting you go to 15 different cities/villages in a book that honestly is mostly set in the wilderness. We made a lot of the same cuts and a lot of different ones. Namely our builds show scenes and locations and we gloss over the plot and characters. However, I loved being able to bring to life scenes and locations that unfortunately got cut from the show. I wanted to try to adapt this in my own way and to show moments or locations that I knew were going to be different. I think the strongest example is my builds of the Waygate.

Now This is how the waygate was described in the book: a wall with doors that hinge open

The first build is how it looks in the show, a platform between stairs-stepped pillars on a hill. Compared to the second picture based off of the books’ description of intricately carved ancient doors that centuries later a cellar had been built around. I knew about the visual change over a year before we saw it on screen, but I wanted the collaboration to highlight some of those differences.

Doug: Kevin can you discuss how you built so many MOCs in such a short period of time, and perhaps touch on some of your tricks to get a beautiful immersive scene out of the build? I know you sometimes didn’t bother with all the aspects of a typical build-for-a-con display.

Kevin: The first step was figuring out what the builds were going to be and dividing them up, but I quickly realized how big these were going to be and the potential time constraints. I am slow on groundwork, and generally dislike doing it, so I decided to reuse what I could. The simplest reuse was the Last Village/Eye of the World builds. I built the Eye of the World scene first and then later took the upward slope section, removed all the plants, replaced the green with dark tan and built a new cliff to sit behind the sloping road. This let me do the Last Village build with about half the amount of work primarily just focusing on the river and bridge.

Kevins eye of the world build, take a good look at those rocks…

The Traveling People and the Emond’s Field builds used the same basic ground. I built it modular, so I could rearrange sections and easily swap in and out the steam on the left side. I did have to replate a lot of sections from dark green to dark tan, but it meant when I went to do Emond’s Field, the ground was already about 75% done.

While most of the builds were complete and convention ready, some were exclusively built for a picture. The build for Remembrance of Dreams loses a lot when you see the behind the scenes picture.

Zoom out… and the scene is a tad messier!

Doug: I love that you were able to reuse the big round “Travelling People” base for a couple scenes, and same for the cliff path from the “Eye of the World.” Great planning ahead to allow yourself to cover more ground faster, as you bit off a ton to chew in this collaboration!

Looking at the prior image above it begs the question: can you talk about your extensive use of TV and PC screens as a backdrop for the photos in the collaboration? That’s not done very often, and if builders are looking to add a scene behind their MOC they typically follow a very painstaking and manual process for editing out the background to drop in an image layer behind the image. It can also be challenging due to the lighting conditions in the photo not matching the new background so subtle details are off like the colors around the edges of the parts etc.

Kevin: You can see that I used my computer to project the sunset background. This lets the lighting reflect off of the pieces and resulted in me not needing to use photoshop. I first came up with this over a year ago for the Traveling People build, and have been using my TV as a backdrop nearly exclusively ever since. There are pros and cons to it, you can see my in-depth breakdown of tips and benefits of this technique on YouTube here.

Doug: So Kevin what was your favorite build of the collaboration?

Kevin: I love your Whitebridge build. The bridge itself perfectly captures the description in the books. It is an ancient and otherworldly structure that seems impossibly frail. The bridge is a remnant of the Age of Legends and had been made with the use of the One Power; I love the juxtaposition that Doug was able to get between the bridge and the village that later grew up around it.

Of my builds, I think I’m happiest with the Traveling People build. That one is a more unique build and matches my original vision the closest. I also really like the Dark Along the Ways build. It was really interesting to photograph a build nearly entirely lit by the lanterns the characters were holding.

Doug: As for me, there's a number of favorites, and perhaps the top two are Kevin's traveling people (Tinker camp) and the Shadar Logoth builds. They both are really great immersive and well-lit and photographed scenes. The tinker wagons are perfectly colorful and the layout of a camp in mid-party mode is especially organic.

I also think we all are impressed at the sheer scale and magnificent look and feel that Kevin achieved with Shadar Logoth. Of my own builds, while I particularly like how the bridge came out for Whitebridge, I actually think Caemlyn is my favorite because it was so much fun to work on a castle for the first time in forever.

Kevin’s Shadar Logoth - a closeup of the party looking down at the Evil of Mashadar

Ok now let’s make a quick detour to chat with Joe (JnJ Bricks) to get his take on things. Joe, first off, I understand you’re reading the books, how far along are you now? Also, any thoughts on participating in the collab and can you tell us if you had a favorite build?

Joe: I’m part way through Book 3. I loved the collab and participating in it. Wish I had had more time for a few more builds! I do wish the show had more of our scenes though haha. My favorite builds from it were “Daughter Heir” and “The Last Village.” I definitely recommend people read the series! Otherwise they will miss out on a lot of details that were put into the collab.

Doug: Another fun aspect of the collab has been showing my builds at local shows this fall/winter. First in early October was BrickCon and right after that was Grit City Comicon in Tacoma WA, and at both of those shows I displayed “Crossing the Taren” and “Whitebridge” and the funny thing was how few people recognized the source material. It was a running gag with the SeaLUG group that when I was off talking to others or not around they’d jokingly tell people it was Narnia, or LOTR, or whatever struck their fancy to get a giggle. A few excited fans recognized the source material and many had at least heard of the show that was coming out soon.

Fast forward to Emerald City Comicon which was in December after the show had aired, and I displayed “Crossing the Taren” and “The Daughter Heir” (Caemlyn Palace Gardens) and though I wasn’t there during most of the show, my friends tell me the crowd recognized “Crossing the Taren” almost universally which is super exciting. As the Caemlyn Palace was cut from Season 1 of the show, understandably that scene was mainly recognized only by the die-hard fans. It was neat to see how popular culture familiarity with a scene changes so drastically with a TV show like that!

Across the Taren and Whitebridge on display at Brickcon 2021!

I believe Kevin is planning to bring several of the MOCs to Bricks Cascade next year, as will I, so it will be especially nice to see so many of them together at once!

Alllllrighty everyone, it is time to share all the amazing builds! We’ll post the main image of each with the date and link you to the high-res Flickr image, and also the Instagram photo slide shows so you can look through the additional details if you wish!

Home

Kinslayer (Kevin Wanner)

Emond’s Field (Kevin Wanner)

Winternight (Kevin Wanner)

Across the Taren (Douglas Hughes - me!)

Bearlon (Joe - JnJ Bricks)

Remembrance of Dreams (Kevin Wanner)

Shadows Waiting (Kevin Wanner)

Flight Down the Arinelle (Kevin Wanner)

The Traveling People (Kevin Wanner)

Whitebridge (Douglas Hughes - me!)

Children of Shadow (Kevin Wanner)

The Last Village (Kevin Wanner)

The Dragon Reborn (Kevin Wanner)

The Daughter Heir (Douglas Hughes - me!)

Caemlyn Waygate (Kevin Wanner)

Dark Along the Ways (Kevin Wanner)

The Eye of the World (Kevin Wanner)

Tarwin’s Gap (Kevin Wanner)

From the West (Douglas Hughes - me!)

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