In this week’s “Inside LEGO Masters” article, Paras Patani, one half of the Moto and Paras team, brings us a retrospective on his time at LEGO Masters. Each week we will bring you insight from the builders themselves as they share what it was like building under pressure, handling the challenges, and any behind-the-scenes secrets they discovered along the way.

This is your official spoiler warning for LEGO Masters US Season 2.

I can hear it now… the scene is Fifth Avenue, New York City, in the boardroom of a world-class fashion designer. The Creative Art Director comes in and lays out the challenge… “We are going to introduce to the world a beautiful fashion accessory! Something that will just knock everybody’s socks off. And, we’re going to put our best Engineers on it!” ... Wait! Whaa?

This is basically what LEGO Masters Season 2 - Episode 4 was for Moto and me! More generally, this melding of engineering and art is the perspective that we brought with us into the competition. And it’s who we are in our daily lives. Being on LEGO Masters, I learned to combine these aspects of technical ability and creativity, with story-telling as a way to inspire and impact an audience.

The first time my Season 2 castmates and I walked on to the LEGO Masters set, one could hear a pin drop! It was surreal, our eyes wide open and our jaws on the floor. We were mesmerized by the view of being on the inside of this gorgeous, blue arena of the LEGO Olympics. It was beautiful! As we got comfortable with the experience and our nerves from the lights, cameras, and celebrities abated, we turned to focus on the task at hand.

Right away with Episode 1, Michael “Moto” Kanemoto and I presented ourselves as two Engineer-Fathers that are connected by LEGO. In “Present Day,” the name of our first build, we showcased two LEGO-Robot Dads, Moto with his son and me with my daughter, introducing ourselves to each other and coming together with presents on our first playdate. Moto used his artistry to create two fun, playful robots; and I used my engineering skills to create engaging motion with gears, motors, and a solid core structure. As our Parade Float moved around the track, our robot-dads danced a little jig, hopefully bringing smiles to everyone’s faces!

In our build for Episode 2 - Hero Shot, we drew Elf Girl from LEGO Collectible Minifigure Series 17 as our character. We created a story of an evil company having constructed a large hydroelectric dam and sucking all the water and color from the surrounding ecology. All that remained was a lone Rainbow Tree, teetering on the cusp of extinction. Helpless, the animals reach out to Varuna, the Elf Goddess of Nature, to save them. With her powers, Varuna summoned the wrath of nature and blew up the dam releasing a rainbow of color and restoring balance to the region.

In this build, Moto and I switched our engineering and artistic roles. Moto created compartments inside the mountain to house the squib charges. I created the desolate desert scene with water trickling through and dead corpses of animals and foliage all around, with the exception of a lone Rainbow Tree. Our goal with the build was to present what happens with the over-use of technology without regard to its impact on the environment, and that engineering without art is devoid of emotion and inspiration.

Episode 3 - Make & Shake is where we really shined. In our build, we created a 4-ft tall skyscraper that could withstand an “11 on the Brickter Scale.” If more than one team’s build reached 11, the judges would consider creativity and storytelling as subordinate considerations. Challenge accepted! Moto and I were in our element here. We had confidence in our technical abilities; but aesthetically, our design left a lot to be desired. Architecturally, we utilized a traditional Curtain-Wall design, whereby the outer shell of our tower was designed to fall off quite quickly. This has the advantage of significantly reducing the weight and inertia of the build as it shook on the shake table.

Structurally, our design used a Lattice-Rebar cage structure that combined System bricks and Technic components to hold our skyscraper together. However, spending all this time on engineering limited the amount of time we could spend on creativity and storytelling. Once we were confident of the build’s structural integrity, we raced to put together our honeycomb beehive; but ultimately just ran out of time. While our build was undoubtedly among the strongest of the teams, in retrospect, an argument can certainly be made that we perhaps could have spent more time on its artful representation.

Which brings us to Episode 4 - Hats Incredible. Our randomly selected Tan color immediately inspired Moto and me to think about Australia, Crocodile Dundee, and the Outback. For the challenge, we had to create a fashionable hat, at least 2-feet in height, and that could be worn while strutting down a runway catwalk. We were allowed to support the hat with our hands, but it needed to hold itself together for at least five seconds, on camera, without this support.

Creating our hat was the toughest build I have certainly undertaken! I went with using Mixel ball joints in order to create a flowing “fabric” of LEGO plates in the shape of a Stetson. Moto created a beautiful green snake named “Seemore” (because it could see more from its high perch) with piercing red eyes and menacing fangs. With the head of our snake being top-heavy, and the brim of our hat being malleable, bringing these two together was not easy. We hoped it would hold together long enough to get us through the fashion show; but alas… engineers don’t wear Prada, after all, do they?

Turning two engineers into fashionistas ultimately proved too much for us to put together a product that exhibited strong creativity and storytelling, but with technical ability that we needed to implement within the time given for the challenge. While we had conducted tests for fit and balance, the hat was definitely not robust in its design, and when Moto lifted it to put onto my head, Seemore’s tree trunk separated from its base, leaving the brim of the hat on the table!

Seeing our hat fall apart backstage in this way, I did not want to go out onto the runway and experience the embarrassment of our hat disintegrating in spectacular fashion in front of millions of people on national television. But Moto and my castmates rallied around me. They gave me the love and strength I needed to say “c'est la vie” and to strut myself down the catwalk as confidently as possible in order to finish the challenge we had started.

As I reflect on my LEGO Masters experience,

Moto and my castmates are extraordinarily talented LEGO artists and I am immensely grateful for sharing in this rarified experience with them.
When many of us create MOCs at home, we are able to inject the time needed to learn new techniques, trial different methods, and perfect our designs. We are not afforded these luxuries on LEGO Masters.
Engineering and Art, each by themselves, are limited in their abilities to impact the world around us. Together, however, they have the ability to elevate our message and inspire each other.

I remain thankful for the opportunity to participate in LEGO Masters. It was so cool! I knew being part of the show would be a highlight, once-in-a-lifetime experience and I was (and remain) committed to enjoying it as much as I possibly could for as long as I could. Moto and I tried our best, and that was all we could reasonably ask from ourselves. As summarized at the end of Episode 4, “There is no shame in failure; there’s only failure in not trying.”

Have you ever tried and failed at building a LEGO creation? What did you learn from that experience? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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