This last weekend, I participated in the Paredes de Coura Fan Weekend together with many of my fellow BrickNerds. The LEGO convention usually happens in Portugal but was online this year for due to the pandemic.

When I joined BrickNerd last year, it was with this task in mind: covering big European events—something I really have not been able to do so far, for obvious reasons. But since the Paredes de Coura (PdC) Fan Weekend ended up being online this year (as opposed to being cancelled like it was in 2020) I couldn’t miss it! I haven’t missed a single PdC Fan Weekend since it started, in 2016.

The first year, I went with very few friends from my LUG and we knew no one in Portugal. And when we came back home we had a lot of new friends! That’s why I really can’t compare an online event with a physical one. But this topic has been talked to death already, let’s talk about the event… and to be an online event I have to say it turned out really well!

Disclaimer! I helped the steering team of the event, mainly with tests, suggestions and technical stuff, so I admit I might be a bit biased in my opinions!

Convention Kit

First of all, a few weeks before the event, all participants* received a kit. Participation was 50 EUR and the fee covered all the “swag” and the worldwide shipping. In the kit, we found an event T-shirt, a wonderful custom set (with box and professional instructions), the event’s 1x8 bricks, an additional Paredes T-shirt for padding (!) and a mysterious opaque bag that could not be opened before the event (back to this later.)

*When I say “all participants” I actually mean “all participants except some very unlucky ones whose kits are still stuck in Miami US Customs for some reason. Probably the fact that the “mysterious bag” was made of opaque mylar didn’t help.

The custom set, “Ricky Airplane” and the event’s bricks.

Day 1

The event was streamed live on YouTube for free for everyone (the public could only watch the stream “passively” and not take part to activities) and both days will remain there, so you can watch everything whenever you want. I will link the single chapters of the videos in the rest of this post.

The event started at 9:00 am Portuguese time. Miguel Reizinho from the steering team opened with a short speech like he always does. He generally does that standing on a table in the PdC Centro Cultural—this time he was just sitting at his desk at home (hopefully with pants on), but in any case he welcomed us all. He then introduced us to Jan Beyer, from LEGO’s AFOL Engagement team, and a surprise guest, Jan’s former colleague Kim Thomsen! Kim hasn’t worked for LEGO for a year and a half now, but like Jan, he was there when the PdC Fan Weekend started so it just felt right to have him there to introduce the event. They talked a bit about the origins of the event, and Jan illustrated the general current global situation for fan events.

And then it was time to meet our two hosts for the weekend. Are M. Heiseldal doesn’t need any introductions here, since he’s a fellow BrickNerd, and I don’t think that Rod Gillies needs an introduction either. I’ll just say he’s Scottish—and who doesn’t love a Scottish accent to get them through the weekend? They briefly introduced each other and during the event, they took turns in presenting all the talks and panels. While one of them was interacting with the speaker, the other would be looking for questions from participants in the event’s chat.

Technically, the event was set up this way: participants had access to a single daily Zoom meeting and everything took place there. Everybody was muted and kept their cameras off except for the hosts and the speakers, but all participants always had access to the common chat. During lunch breaks, everybody could turn their microphones and cameras on and socialize. Participants had also access to a Discord server for info and chit-chat and the whole event was also recorded and streamed live with a short delay on YouTube, for everyone else, as I previously mentioned.

Before moving to the first speaker we had another BrickNerd member introduce an activity: Markus Rollbühler with Iron Forge! The mysterious bag most participants had received could now be finally opened. The bag included a bunch of parts, and one of these was the seed part that had to be used to build something during the weekend.

The seed part turned out to be a Windscreen 5 x 2 x 1 2/3 in lime. Yes, in lime. Probably not the best part ever to build with, so it was a challenge indeed!

The first speaker was Michael Peebles from Australia. He talked about Brickvention, the most important Australian event that very recently was “promoted” to ANE (AFOL Networking Event, like the Skærbæk/PdC/Kobe Fan Weekends and many American events like BrickCon.) This does look to be an event not to miss. (I was planning to go to the next one in January 2022, but probably it’s going to be too soon.)

At the end of this slot, we had an unannounced speaker, Stephan Sander from the Skærbæk Fan Weekend, who talked a little about the upcoming event in September. If everything goes according to plan, many of us will finally be able to see each other there in person!

Studies for a Castle minifigure by Tore.

The next speaker was Tore Alexandersen, a LEGO graphic designer. His talk was about his work on LEGO minifigures, but “thanks” to a technical glitch we probably got an even better talk! For some reason, he wasn’t able to share his screen, so while he was emailing his presentation to Rod, who later shared it on his behalf, he told us a bit more about himself and that turned out to be really very interesting. Let me just tease that he’s a second-generation designer and he told us of that one time his father tried to bring home from work (after asking for permission) what I understand was a glued 7740 locomotive. Just watch the video to find out the full story!

Then it was Kevin Gascoigne’s turn. Kev is the Chief Fairy at Fairy Bricks, the charity organization from the UK we’ve all come to love in the last few years. He told us a bit of what they do (bring LEGO sets to children in hospitals), how they kept doing that during the pandemic, how they ended up also bringing sets to the children of NHS’s workers (with some incredibly quick action on TLG’s part), and he also recalled the terrible robbery they suffered last year. (If you want to make a donation to help them, you can do it on PayPal.)

After the lunch break, we were back with LEGO Ideas and BrickLink (with Hasan Jensen from Ideas, BrickLink Head Marvin Park, and Tanja Friberg who’s moving from the AFOL Engagement Team in Billund to BrickLink in California in her new role as Community Engagement Director). Hasan talked about the latest trends in LEGO Ideas while Marvin and Tanja talked about the new AFOL Designer Program.

Then we moved on to a panel with five other people… Marcos Bessa, António Ricardo Silva, César Soares, Pablo Gonzalez and Tiago Reis Catarino. And what do these five guys have in common, besides being (or having been, in Tiago’s case) LEGO designers? They were all members of Portuguese LUG Comunidade 0937 before moving to Billund! The panel was aptly called “From 0937 to LEGO Designer” and that’s what they talked about. (Seriously, there must be something in the water in Portugal. Or maybe in some other drinks…)

The insane amount of details inside Nick’s model. — The *insane* amount of details inside Nick’s model.

The last session of the day was with spaceship builder Nick Trotta. If you don’t know him, just check out his Flickr account, his models are amazing. He showed us a new ship in detail, including a great look at the inside of the model, revealing how he could achieve such great shapes.

To close the first day, Rod invited us all to participate in a “Batman puzzle challenge.” It was another fun game that we could do during the evening on our own time that consisted of a series of password-protected PDF documents where, starting with a first unprotected document, you had to solve a riddle per document to get the password to the next one. And in the last one, you could find the secret sentence to email back to Rod. It definitely wasn’t easy!

Day 2

Day two kicked off with Richard Jones from Melbourne, Australia, who talked about how classic themes like Space, Castle, Town and Pirate do (or do not) keep on living today in other themes. Richard will be expanding this talk into a series of articles on his excellent blog The Rambling Brick in the coming months.

Richard was followed by another Aussie (it was a reasonable choice to put people from Down Under early in the morning… but I was pleased to find many of them still there at the end of the event anyway when it was so late for them!). Dale Harris is a Neo-Classic Space builder who came up with a great concept: applying “neo”-like rules to another discontinued and beloved theme: Fabuland! So he talked about the path that from Neo-Classic Space led to his amazing Neo-Fabuland MOCs.

Then it was the turn of builder extraordinaire Jonas Kramm, from New Elementary and StoneWars.de. Jonas presented his new 12x12 MOC and showed us how he built all of the small cool details in it.

To wrap up the morning we had Tiago Catarino… again! This time he was alone and his presentation was extremely interesting, since he talked about how he came back to Portugal after working for LEGO in Billund for a few years and how he still makes a living with LEGO, having now become a full-time YouTuber! Lots of tips and tricks for anyone interesting in pursuing this career, but also something for everyone too!

We had lunch break and then we were back with… us! The BrickNerd panel kicked off the afternoon, and Dave Schefcik talked (briefly in Portuguese!) about the project with Are, explaining who we are, what we do, why we do it… and then Markus, Keith Reed, Sue Ann Barber and I also joined the conversation and talked a bit about the community and what we do. I hope this was interesting for everyone and that it made some people curious about us. I’m sure that Dave’s wonderful LEGO room in the background (with a boxed Yellow Castle!) and his new amazing multicolored mosaic also helped. :-)

Activities

Ours was the last real presentation—it was then time for the activities. Kev Gascoigne was back to help with the raffle. Every participant had automatically been included in a raffle and we used this useful website to draw the winners using a spinning wheel. We also used it to draw the winners for Rod’s puzzle challenge.

Finally, the time has come for the quiz! The quiz in Paredes has always been one of the most exciting activities. Are was in charge of it this year, and he came up with 50 very good questions. We used AhaSlides, a Kahoot-like tool. We had tested it a couple of times, once during our monthly Nerd Out meetup for Patrons here at BrickNerd (with different questions) and then another one internally with the PdC team with the real questions so that we could tweak a few of them and notice any potential problems. We did have a couple of problems in the real quiz (that of course didn’t occur in the tests!), but nothing major, just a couple of answers that decided to show up before their questions! Having helped with the final test also meant I couldn’t participate in the real quiz (but that turned out to be a good thing since I wouldn’t have won anyway :D). Congratulations to the winners, Ruben, Huw and Richard!

After the quiz, Markus and Simon Liu (another BrickNerd member) went through the Iron Forge submissions and named the winner (Congratulations, Jason!)… and that ended the activities. We were briefly back with Miguel for the closing speech and the event was over. Zoom remained open for everyone for a couple more hours (not on YouTube, sorry!) for some final socializing and greetings.

In Summary

So, was it the same as being there in person? Of course not, not even remotely (pun intended). Paredes de Coura is one of those events where human interactions are at the core, and it can’t be the same on a computer. It was the first major European event to turn the AFOL lounge into an essential thing (that I subsequently and shamelessly copied in all my events). We need to be back there as soon as possible, hopefully in 2022, but right now, not being able to do that, I must say that everything was even better than I anticipated.

You could actually feel a bit of the real PdC vibe in the air, and that was good, it felt like home. And of course, there’s the positive thing that we could have people attend from very far away who wouldn’t have been able to come to a physical event. Some do travel, even from the other side of the world, but not all of them, or not every year, anyway. So in the future maybe we might try and think of a global streaming option for presentations and activities when the event will be back to normal. While there will be no hugs (and no food) for people at home, at least they’ll be able to experience something, like we all did this year.

So hopefully that helped you feel like you were there too. I hope you watch some of all of the videos, and next year’s Paredes de Coura Fan Weekend can’t come soon enough!

Have you ever been to Paredes de Coura? Share your memories in the comments below.

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