Day 2 was another great day. I started off by attending a few presentations. The first one was “The Lego News Room: Working at the Speed of Social Media.” This was about how LEGO in the US handles social media, carries on conversations across multiple channels, and keeps up with real time popular items. I’m not great at social media by any means so this was eye opening to me and it was interesting to hear what they had to say.
The next presentation I joined in on was “New Element Design from a Mechanical Engineering Perspective.” Two engineers from LEGO in Billund, Denmark talked about some of the parts they’ve designed, some of the challenges they’ve encountered, and what their experiences are working on the team.
Here are a few copies of slides they presented with examples of some parts the presenters worked on. They did specific parts, not the full minifigues.
They also showed us some of the software they use to make changes to parts. The picture below is an example of a part that they walked us through to talk about how they adjusted a part to improve its quality.
The next session I joined was an Ask Me Anything session with Jordan Paxton of the AFOL Engagement Team. Jordan helps run the LEGO® Ambassador Network (LAN) and while I have been a part of conversations with the LAN and AFOL Engagement Team in the past, this one was very heated and emotional. I was actually quite shocked how passionate people were. I’m not 100% certain on what is going on, but I guess a few LEGO User Groups (LUGs) were removed from the LAN and with that, they lost access to support from the LEGO Group and discount parts.
Two notes I did take were that we shouldn’t expect to see new set reveals at conventions and the brittle brown bricks issue has been solved, but LEGO has done a poor job advertising it. I guess the brown parts were stored at the top of the warehouse (warmest) and there was a color change issue that took place. Since then, they have added fans to warehouse and the issue has been fixed. What are you all seeing with your newer brown pieces?
The last thing I participated in was the Keynote presentation which was given by Angus MacLane. He is probably best known as a Director with Pixar, but is also an AFOL. I didn’t know it, but he was the fan designer behind set #21303-1: WALL-E. He stated that he was in the perfect position for the build as he was a part of the movie team so he knew about WALL-E well in advance and could start working on a LEGO version. Also, he was the one to approve the IP for Pixar so the LEGO designers had to work with him on any changes they made.
His introduction was given by someone in a Buzz Lightyear costume which was awesome!
He bragged that in making the Lightyear movie, he made sure the ship had a yellow windscreen to make sure that LEGO produced another yellow windscreen part. I don’t know how true that is, but I’m not sure I care. Glad the piece is out there now.
His talk was awesome, well put together, and very relatable for LEGO fans. As someone mentioned, this session was well worth the $25 registration fee to sign up. I actually think it may end up on YouTube in the near future. If it does, I’ll add a link.
The main purpose of the talk was to present how he goes about building MOCs. He uses the SUCCS method (defined below) and he went through various examples of builds he’s done and how he used this method. I don’t think I could do the talk justice here so just stay tuned for the video.
Onto day 3! Happy building!
