Many Updates!

So I've been pretty much burned out since Star Wars Celebration VI... I was let go from my job 2 days after after our group (GFLUG) displayed at Star Wars Celebration VI.  I had a lot of fun at the event, that turned quickly into figuring out my next life move would be.  Fortunately for us, I managed to find a job pretty quickly (as a contractor), with minimal impact to our family.

At the beginning of October, another GFLUG member (Michael Zehr) and I ended up doing a small LEGO display at the Winter Garden Music Festival. Michael's Winter Garden in minifig scale looks wonderful, especially the train station... About that time I started experimenting with the iPhone's new panoramic feature and dabbling with Instagram again.

With the new job, I was a little worried about a vacation we had planned with some friends for later October -- we were going to California, with trips to Legoland and Disneyland.  My wife and I really wanted to check out the new Cars Land and we were not disappointed.  We were also not disappointed with the Star Wars Miniland at Legoland -- we hadn't seen it since it opened.  Oh! and Erika, Joe and I met up with some of the SandLUG peoples down in San Diego -- I was great getting seeing everyone again.

BrickHaven 2012 came and went -- it was a little bit of a bust, but for some GFLUG members, it was a chance to catch up with a few friends from out of town... In a sense, it was doomed from the beginning.  On one hand, it had a few exciting things going for it -- it was Legoland Florida's 1st anniversary, Brick-or-Treat, and the park announce it was getting a Star Wars miniland to open up sometime in October.  The other hand, it really only gave AFOLs less than a few months to plan for, with uncertainties about details -- part of which I take some responsibility for... more on this later.

Festival of the Masters' theme this year was "The 80s" for the 80th anniversary of LEGO -- there was some great 80's themed models.  Some honorable mentions -- Pitfall by Erika Fiorenza, Lite Bright by Sydney MacDonald, Jem and the Holograms vs. The Misfits by Amber & Roger, but I think the one that stole everyone's heart was Q-Bert by Mark Staffa -- and I think Disney releasing the Wreck-It Ralph movie had a lot to do with it.

...I was so burned out, I ended up recycling a MOC from Star Wars Celebration VI: Han in Carbonite Minifig Carrying Case.  I'm a little disappointed in myself; FotM is generally where I build something new and something very different.

Star Wars Celebration VI & BrickHaven

So GFLUG and myself has been busy getting ready for Star Wars Celebration VI coming up Aug. 23-26 here in Orlando, FL.  It was a lot of fun last time around, this year is proving to be just as exciting to see what people will build and bring to the event.

One of the ideas I had this time around was to combine the Minifigure Presentation Boxes with Han in Carbonite -- to create a play on the Darth Vader figure storage case I had as a kid.  I'm also working on a light-up Mustafar display again (slightly larger). And I'm thinking about building a Wookie tree house from the Star Wars Christmas special, including a Santa Yoda.  :)

In other news, I got a call from Legoland FL about doing an AFOL event at Legoland, come fall time.  We're calling it BrickHaven; a play on the town Legoland, FL is located in (Winter Haven).  Looking at dates, the best one I could come up with is the weekend of Nov. 3 & 4 -- it's short notice, but it's the weekend after Brick-or-Treat and the weekend before Festival of the Masters -- so if anyone is looking for an excuse to take a vacation for a week, that would be a fun filled LEGO week.

Keep an eye on the web-site for updates, I'll be posting them there.  I've set up a Facebook Group if anyone is interested.  Right now I'm looking for support and feedback, so e-mail me at brickbuildr@gmail.com.

An Interview, A Presentation and An Update

Over at A Look at LEGO podcast, a friend of mine, Paul Janssen was interviewed about building the Ohio State University horseshoe... I haven't seen it in person yet, but I know it's a monster build.  I vaguely remember when he announce to the LUG that he was going to build it, so it was nice to reminisce.

Thinking about monster LEGO buildings reminded me of a presentation that I gave at BrickMagic '10, on Building Commissions.  I had uploaded it to BrickBuildr, but under the 'downloads' section, I guess I forgot to add a link -- it's there now.

I should update the presentation a little, there's more information I could add, now that we've completed the Miami Children's Hospital build... updated photos of the model, a small picture gallery of source images, a quick snapshot of architecture drawings we used, etc., to give a rough idea of the process we go through for building a large model.  It sounds like a similar process Paul went through to build the horseshoe, but he was a one man builder, whereas we had 4 builders.

On a side note, our LUG is getting ready for Star Wars Celebration VI.  Which means I've been a slacker, and only have a few weeks left to build.  :)  I've started on project if you haven't seen it in my Flickr stream -- I'm a little further along than what's pictured here, but not much...

If you're going to be in town for Star Wars Celebration, give us a shout out.