BrickFest 2005

Discussion and planning of large-scale Castle Themed displays and events
Magnus
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Post by Magnus »

quiksand, thanks for your interest! Anyone who hears about BrickkFest and is interested enough to spend 60 bucks and a whole weekend doing LEGO stuff is welcome and encouraged to come along. Note that this is primarily for adults, (see Lenny's post above).

BrickFest 2005 is on 12-14 of August in Arlington, VA (ten minutes outside of Washington DC).

Check out this link, you can find out all the updated info there, and register if you'd like to join in the fun.

http://dc.brickfest.com/

I can't stress enough that this event is for ANY and EVERY AFOL out there who is interested in coming. We look forward to seeing familiar faces of course, but bringing in new people every year is vital to keeping the event evolving with fresh ideas and visions.

BrickFest is a pretty hectic and LEGO-filled weekend, (and very social too). If you'd like to see other stuff around town without missing out on stuff, I'd suggest planning to stay in the area for a few extra days before or after.
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architect
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Post by architect »

Hey Magnus,

Is there any chance we will get more space than just the castle room? We may need it this year.

Ben
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dragonfly
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Post by dragonfly »

Hello all,

MICRO Castle & SIG FIGS VIGS

For those of you attending BrickFest, please consider tucking a MICRO Castle creation or a VIG featuring your "sig fig", in your suitcase.



It would be totally awesome if many of you would create a MICRO version of the minifig scaled Castle MOCs that you are already bringing or your very own MICRO version of an existing Lego Castle set. Keep in mind, in MICRO the castle kings and queens are the size of a mere, one by one round brick. Keeping in this scale allows for us to have an overall cohesive layout. There has been a MICRO award set specifically aside for Castle.

Also, NEW for this year, "VIG this!!!" A contest that lets your signature Castle fig shine in your own Vignette. Lets see how many sig figs we can get on display. YOU guys can't let the townies and the spacers out number the Castle figs, can you???? (Now off to place the same challenge over in ClassicSpace, wink)

For those of you flying in, MICRO and VIG gives you the perfect place to be able to participate when "space" (err, umm) is at a premium. Thanks for considering it, and please fill out your MOC card on the BF site for all your MICRO and VIG creations.

Looking forward to what you come up with. Contest info here.... http://www.bmts.com/~bccook/microvig.htm

Sincerely, Janey Red Brick
Micro and Vig Coordinator
Janey "[url=http://www.bmts.com/~bccook]Red Brick[/url]"
I'm off to see the Wizard.
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The Green Knight
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Post by The Green Knight »

Man, I sooooo wish I could go to this. Hey, I'm not saying I won't be there, I'm just saying if I am there it will be a miracle.

And man, if I could make it, the one thing I would love to orginize is another Gathering. It wouldn't be so unthinkable if everyone was aready bringing their Sig-figs. I mean, the Gathering was one of the things that really got me into Lego-Castle and even castles in general.
Magnus wrote:Other ideas for the Castle Room are of course welcome and encouraged.
Ok, well as long as we're alowing pipe dreams, here's my idea.

First, you get your humongus, uber-cool, CC-town layout put together and completed to beautiful masterful perfection.

Second, you get one of those really tiny color-cameras(like they use on the miniature LOTR sets) on a long, thin pole

Then you enlist one of those people from the Brickfilms room. (Who I have an enormous amount of respect for, by the way. If I only had a camera... *sigh*) to come over and operate it when you---

Lastly, send it through the narow streets of the city, recording it all from a minifig's perspective.

Then you simply throw it in the VCR (or what have you) and whalah! An in depth overveiw of the town, that you can show durring the expo.

Now wouldn't that make the spacers turn green! :twisted:
Magnus wrote:Competition-wise though, I'd like to do something different this year. I've heard about some great MOCs being built as we speak, but it would be great to have a competition - especially one that might draw a crowd. I may have an idea or two myself, but I want to hear form you guys before I decide for sure.
Well I suposse you could re-use the categories from the CCC. But if you want something to draw folks in... How about some sort of gadiator game? You could throw a bunch of minifigs together or maybe use creatures or something. I don't know, but good luck in whatever you end up doing.
Let us stop for a moment and ponder the signiture...





Ok, enough of that!
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eNiGMa
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Post by eNiGMa »

The Green Knight wrote:First, you get your humongus, uber-cool, CC-town layout put together and completed to beautiful masterful perfection.

Second, you get one of those really tiny color-cameras(like they use on the miniature LOTR sets) on a long, thin pole

Then you enlist one of those people from the Brickfilms room. (Who I have an enormous amount of respect for, by the way. If I only had a camera... *sigh*) to come over and operate it when you---

Lastly, send it through the narow streets of the city, recording it all from a minifig's perspective.

Then you simply throw it in the VCR (or what have you) and whalah! An in depth overveiw of the town, that you can show durring the expo.
That's genius! That would be amazingly awesome. If only I could go this year....
Nathan Cunningham
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Magnus
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space restrictions and MOC cards

Post by Magnus »

architect wrote:Hey Magnus,

Is there any chance we will get more space than just the castle room? We may need it this year.

Ben
If we get a bigger room it won't have that ledge which proved so useful last time. So we shouldn't plan on having more display area than last time, but we also won't have any less. I'm hoping that the CCC city display will only be half the size as last year. Then again, if we do a big countryside display as well, perhaps the modular display will be as big, we'll have to see.

Vigs and Micros stuff will most likely go in a seperate room, so we won't have to worry about that too much.

I'd like to remind everyone to fill out your MOC cards in advance - they make it a lot easier for Ed and myself to plan how to fit everything in. This year we WILL be giving PRIORITY spacewise to MOCs which were REGISTERED IN ADVANCE. I really don't want to have to turn away any MOCs, but as a rule of thumb, we will be giving first dibs to MOCs which were registered with MOC cards, and also to MOCs which have not been displayed at previous BrickFests.

If you still have MOCs which were at previous BrickFests that you'd like to show off (I know I do), I'd encourage you to bring them along in case we have space for them, because there will be people there who missed out on seeing them in the past. But if it gets really tough to fit things in, I may ask people to make space for new stuff that we haven't seen before.
Last edited by Magnus on Mon Jun 06, 2005 3:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
Magnus
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video/photos

Post by Magnus »

The Green Knight wrote:
Magnus wrote:Other ideas for the Castle Room are of course welcome and encouraged.
Ok, well as long as we're alowing pipe dreams, here's my idea.

First, you get your humongus, uber-cool, CC-town layout put together and completed to beautiful masterful perfection.

Second, you get one of those really tiny color-cameras(like they use on the miniature LOTR sets) on a long, thin pole

Then you enlist one of those people from the Brickfilms room. (Who I have an enormous amount of respect for, by the way. If I only had a camera... *sigh*) to come over and operate it when you---

Lastly, send it through the narow streets of the city, recording it all from a minifig's perspective.

Then you simply throw it in the VCR (or what have you) and whalah! An in depth overveiw of the town, that you can show durring the expo.

Now wouldn't that make the spacers turn green! :twisted:
I like that a lot. One of the things we will be trying to do with the CCC display is to focus people's attention towards the details. More info to follow soon; look out for a big announcement in a day or two, along with details about a competition which I'm pretty excited about.
Magnus
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More Brickfest info

Post by Magnus »

OK, a little more on awards and the CCC display:

Awards will of course be given for the best MOCs the room has to offer (yet to be finalized depending on budget, but probably as last year: best small, medium and large MOC).

While Micro and Vig competitions are trans-theme, there will be an award given for Best Castle-related Micro MOC. Vig awards are not done by theme, but Castle-related
vignettes will be elligible for the many vig awards, which is the perfect opportunity to let your Castle signature fig shine in their very own vig." or something like that.

http://www.bmts.com/~bccook/microvig.htm

I'm also very excited about seeing what new cool stuff we can do with the Classic Castle City display this year.

For anyone unfamiliar with CCC (AKA 3Cs) - Classic Castle City is a building style designed for modular community projects for castle builders. The idea being that if everyone builds walls to the same dimension, then they can be hooked up together to form a big impressive display. CCC also has free standing buildings inside the walls and these are typically built on plates rather than a baseplate. This allows us to place them wherever we like at interesting angles, avoiding that modern and highly unmedieval grid city look which works far better for Town and maybe Space displays.

For details of what size to build your CCC MOCs check out:

http://www.classic-castle.com/ccc/standard.html

Here's a link to last year's display - as you can see we had a very large and impressive group effort:

http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=875978

We're going to try to top that this time around. In hindsight, one of the problems last year was that the display was uneccesarily big; it took up space that might otherwise have given viewers more space to walk around and admire it, and it was so large and deep that lots of the great small details got lost (especially for children on the public day, who can't see over walls and buildings as easily as adults). In addition to that, real medieval towns were typically crowded with houses and buildings nestling close to one another. For these reason we're aiming for a leaner and hopefully more manageable and better looking CCC display this year.

This effectively means cramming as many buildings inside a smaller curtain wall, for a more bustling clustered look. We may also only have walls on three sides of the town in order to let people look into the town "from the inside" so to speak.

There all kinds of things I'd love to see this time around, here are just a few ideas for inspiration:

Wall sections:

So if you're building a wall section for the CCC town? Awesome! But why settle for a simple wall section? How about a building built into the wall itself? Instead of building a relatively simple "wall with a turret", how about building a structure which is incorporated ito the wall itself. I was surprised there weren't more of these last year. Think along the lines of the Classic Guarded Inn set for example. That way we save on space and it looks extra cool too!

Remember that your walls will be linked up to everyone else's walls. If you want to build them a different size than the standard, remember to also build some kind of way for your non-standard wall to merge with the standard wall sections that other people bring. One way to do this is have a section of wall that gradually gets shorter til it reaches CCC wall standard size.

Buildings:

Anyone want to branch out in building styles a little? Last year there were a lot of Siskindian-style half timber square houses. That's really cool, but there's other stuff too. Does anyone want to build a log house using the brown Fort Legoredo pieces? Or maybe a mud or stone hut? If you're a big fan of the half timber look, how about going for a larger, less basic building (Derek Schin had a great one last year).

We've also been talking about having a sort of open countryside area, with peasants and stuff - I think would be great - after all, only a small fraction of the population of medieval societies lived in urban areas. For this part of the display, I'm thinking MOCs like a windmill, a lone isolated monastery, peasants' huts, a farm, fields of crops, hmm maybe an outlaw hideout or two, even a small (deserted?) castle.

There will of course also be MOCs which aren't designed to be part of the CCC display and that is totally cool. Right now it looks likely that Castle-related Vigs and Micro MOCs will go along with all the other Micro and Vig stuff rather than be displayed in the Castle room. This is somewhat flexible depending on how much space we have where and the wishes of the individual builder, but we're aiming to do a seperate Micro room and a Vig room. It would be very cool if the Castle theme is well represented there.

Looking forward to seeing you in August

Magnus
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