Love for Lego draws thousands to BrickCan
Artisans show what toy blocks can do at B.C.’s first large-scale convention
Brandon and Taylor Walker have been playing Lego since they were boys. Like most kids, they grew out of their toys — the dinosaurs, superheroes, and stuffies destined for the donation bin as they got jobs and started college.
But not the Lego. That obsession only grew as they aged until they were using their artistic ingenuity to build massive creations.
The 21-year-old twins from Seattle joined thousands of other Legomaniacs and builders this weekend in Richmond for the first large-scale Lego convention held in the province.
More than 5,000 tickets were purchased for the sold-out BrickCan, which ran from last Thursday to Sunday at the River Rock Casino and Resort.
While Brandon brandished a life-size Mjolnir (Thor’s magical hammer) made out of about 1,500 Lego pieces, his brother showed off a 75-centimetre-by-75-centimetre Captain America shield.
“I designed this digitally,” Taylor said, holding up the shield, in symbolic red, white and blue.
It took him about two weeks to fine-tune the design on his computer, he said, and then once he was sure it would work, he ordered the Lego pieces he would need — about 3,500 in total. Assembly took a whole day.
The design process was similar for Brandon’s hammer, taking about two weeks. “Then it takes a while to save up and get the parts,” he said. “But then it only took a few hours to build.”
Unlike some Lego enthusiasts who build elaborate statues only to knock them down, the Walker brothers like to keep their creations intact and bring them to conventions. At BrickCan — their fourth Lego convention — the selfdescribed movie buffs also had on display several spaceships of their own design.
“Our parents would give us little Lego sets when we were kids and then as we got older we stopped playing with all the other toys, but Lego was still entertaining us into our teens,” said Brandon, who aspires to work one day as a 3D modeller. Taylor hopes to be a film director, given his passion for superhero and sci-fi movies.
“It’s the same reason why people like building model airplanes, but Lego is so much more diverse because you take it apart and build other things. It’s cool to put something together and be like, ‘Wow. I built that.’”
It’s not a cheap hobby though, with some sets costing hundreds of dollars. The twins looked sheepish when asked how much they spend a year on Lego. “Too much,” Taylor said, laughing.
Robin Sather, the chairman of the BrickCan Foundation, is one of the organizers of the event. Sather agreed that most Lego enthusiasts he knows spend thousands of dollars a year on the toy blocks.
But when asked what is it about Lego that makes fans and parents the world over dig so deep into pockets for the latest set, Sather chuckled.
“Everyone already knows the answer to that question. I think for me it’s the safe creativity. The things you can make with Lego is infinite, but there are only certain ways Lego can go together. It’s not intimidating. They just go together,” he said. “A blank canvas or a lump of clay — well, that’s a little more intimidating.”
Burned out as an IT professional, Sather turned to his passion when looking for his next career move.
“I’ve always loved Lego, and so I thought maybe there’s some way I can turn this into career,” he said.
Some of the sculptures, such as a large native totem pole bird or a steampunk bust in silver and black, were so artistically crafted they did not look like they were made of Lego.
There were moving trains, spaceships, skyscrapers, castles and countless homages to sci-fi characters, like the Borg from Star Trek. Several displays had intricate moving parts, such as the Lego Great Ball Contraption, made by Kevin Mitcham, a computer programmer from Seattle, and his team of five builders.
“I’d say the number of pieces is in the tens of thousands,” Mitcham said. The ball contraption, which is apparently a popular theme at Lego conventions, is made up of dozens of individual modules, which balls move through powered by old Lego train controllers.
“Everything on this table is made of Lego, except the tablecloth,” Mitcham said. “At some conventions they get even bigger. In Chicago they had one that looped around the entire room.”
While the twins like to hang on to their artwork, Sather has a more Zen approach. In his workshop at home in Abbotsford, he once built a Hong Kong skyscraper out of 250,000 Lego pieces. It took two months to build and when he was done he took a photo and knocked it down.
“To me, it’s a sandcastle. The tide is going to come in and wash the beach clean, and then you have a new sandcastle to build,” he said. “My joy comes from the build.”