This weekend I had so much fun!!!! I was invited to help out at an exclusive Star Wars LEGO build for the grand opening of the 3D version of Episode I – The Phantom Menace. There were only 13 cities in North America chosen to have an exclusive LEGO opportunity and as there is no LEGO store yet in Vancouver, they needed someone to staff this build. Jenn to the rescue! LOL
I took along a good friend, LEGO Ambassador John Langrish, and we set out from Victoria at 5:00AM Saturday morning. After a nice long nap on the ferry and an hour’s drive we arrived at the Langley BC Colossus Theatre and began setting up the build area. The model shop at LEGO’s US hub in Enfield CT has a sweet little set-up for this one-day build and it took about five minutes to get the mystery mosaic unwrapped and assembled for the event. I will post more pictures on Flickr later so you can see it for yourselves, but essentially there are bins of bricks on one side of an A-frame contraption, and on the other side the mosaic board pictured above. In all this 12 large baseplate sized board holds 12,648 1×1 LEGO bricks.
As a part of the excitement at this movie theatre, members of the 501st were enlisted to entertain the crowds dressed up in their Stars regalia. We had Stormtroopers, Boba Fett, Jedi, and an adorable remoted controlled R2-D2 flirting around us the entire day. Oh, and the centre of all the attention was definitely our friend Mister Maul as you can see above! His make-up was flawless and the background music throughout the day was the giggles and screams of the kids he chased around the lobby. The guy never dropped out of character. These Star Wars icons were joined by smaller versions of themselves when the face painters got hold of all the younglings and went to town. There were definitely talented artists among their number as you will see from my Flickr gallery.
The crowd came in fits and starts and the build progressed slowly. We had set a goal to be finished at 6PM, but with an hour left we still had 25% of the bricks to place with barely a soul around to help us build. Fortunately we found help and about eight dedicated Star Wars fans braved studded finger calluses to rapidly finish the massive undertaking. I was absolutely thrilled to see how eager they were to help out, and they took up the challenge to finish this beast with absolute enthusiasm. When we called it done at 6:17PM they didn’t stop and spent the last several minutes sweeping the floor clean of every brick dropped in our frenzy. We could not have asked for a better group of fans as we had in Vancouver.
Thanks everyone! You made our day!!
