Building Commissions (part 2)

With BrickMagic looming sooner, I did a little more work on my Building Commissions presentation... I've actually committed structure into a slide show presentation. :) Which I'll make available on-line after the presentation is given at BrickMagic... or if you e-mail me an ask nicely.

So to continue on from part 1, I wanted to take a second before talking about the formation of Brick Replicas, LLC, and talk about some of the challenges of working on the Holmes Regional Medical Center LEGO Project. It started off by literally being dropped into our laps -- the local LEGO store was first approached with the prospect of building the hospital out of LEGO, to be shown off at a convention in Orlando, then afterwards, it was to be donated to Holmes Regional Medical Center. There were reasons (that I will not go into) that our LEGO club was approached with the project -- two weekends before it had to be built... So I guess, our first challenge was time, but there were four of us decided that it was worth the time and effort to at least attempt it.

Our next challenge was to get an idea of what the hospital looked like, so one of our members drove over to the hospital and snapped photos from multiple angles around the building -- getting permission from hospital security, of course! We used this & arial imagery from (what's now called) bing.com to plan out what we were going to build.

Once we understood what we were constructing, we had to figure out a building scale that would work. The hospital remodel (that we were to show off) encompassed more than 2/3 of the building; it stretched for roughly 2 blocks. We tried to keep the model to roughly the size of a 6' banquet table, but because of scale, we ended up going closer to 9'. Our scale was smaller than minifig, but slightly larger than microscale (where a person is measure 1 brick + 1 plate high; our was closer to 2 bricks + 1 plate high). Our 'figs' used a 1x1 modified plate with clip as hands, so it looked articulated (as you can see in this photo, we have a person pushing a baby carriage).

Sourcing brick became out next challenge, but fortunately for us, Orlando has one of the largest Pick-a-Brick walls. At the time there were tan bricks & trans-black 1x2 bricks, which became out color palette for the building. We were also fortunate that LEGO was selling PaB buckets -- all the bricks you can shove into a bucket for $99. So dark gray 1x2 tile got worked into the parking lot, 2x2 dark tan & light-blay became our sidewalk, green plates became grass, etc. However, we did purchase a few items off of Bricklink to make up for some details we wanted to get into the building, but wasn't able to buy in currently sold sets or from the PaB wall (or cannibalize our own personal collections for)...

...more later...