LEGO Masters NZ - Finale (2025)

Posted by FlagsNZ,

The finale of LEGO Masters NZ occurred in week five, episode nine.

Episode Nine - The Finale

Episode nine started with the final three teams.

To avoid spoilers for those of you watching on catch-up or via some illicit website in other countries we won't reveal the names of the winner team above the fold.

If you're in New Zealand, these episodes can still be downloaded from the TVNZ website.

Teams were given twenty-four hours to build anything they liked.

In third place:

JONO AND DAN

BRICK BUDDIES

With some strategic wins during the series and some very strong builds, Jono and Dan reached Third Place in the first series of LEGO Masters NZ.,

Jono and Dan continued their passion for Kiwiana by depicting a native wildlife scene.

Their scene depicted some underwater fauna including tuna (eels) and koura (freshwater crayfish).

The centrepiece of their build was a tuatara sitting on a decaying log. They are Aotearoa - New Zealand's living dinosaur!

The part I liked most about their build was, however, the piwakawaka (fantail) that is sitting on top of the fern complete with koru (spiral).

In second place:

EMILY AND SARAH

MUMS

Emily and Sarah represent the first All-Female Team in a final of LEGO Masters.

Emily and Sarah's scene reverted to a colourful garden scene.

Emily and Sarah consistently used the full pallet of available colours.

Here is Emily and Sarah's snapshot of an original fairy tale.

The winners of Season One - LEGO Masters New Zealand:

GLENN AND JAKE

LEGO MATES

David: Thanks for joining me tonight. I accept the fact that you're quite busy. You've been on the radio. I've seen you on Breakfast on One News. You are quite the celebrities in the media.

Jake: For the minute.

David: Your fifteen minutes of fame or more like a week of fame. But. . . Congratulations. Well done!

Jake: Thank you

Glenn: Thanks so much.

David: Right from the start, your team were one of the strong contenders. If I go back through some of your previous builds you had a consistent strength with what you two were able to pull out of the hat.

When I first interviewed you had built the amazing Rescue Zoo. And then you had built England's Finest Tea. I have to say though when I was watching that because the cricket ball took the head off the soldier, I thought, “oh gee, was that a bit fringe!”

Glenn: It didn’t quite hit where we wanted it to.

David: And the soldier holding on to the Corgi and that was pretty cool. And then in the cut in half challenge you built the snare drum. The girls won that one with their octopus on the barbecue.

Glenn: Yeah, we were second then.

Jake: It became a bit of a recurring theme, Dave: We were second on every episode, except episode two and then were first in episode seven. We skipped episode eight and came first in episode nine.

Glenn: We ended up, including the story challenge, we had six seconds and two firsts.

David: That's quite an impressive scorecard. You built the green superhero Broccoli Man hanging from a Technic Brick and then. . .

Jake: Then there was the monochrome challenge. We built the Holding it Together with the red heart.

David: That's right. That was quite clever. I liked that one. Next, you built the game with the man opening up. There seemed to be a bit of confusion about what the actual criteria were.

In my previous Exit Interview, I did with Andrew and Georgie, they said that actually knowing the challenge two days in advance did people a bit of disservice, because they overthought it, and they were designing a game with all the rules and everything. Where Robin really just wanted a build that would be the picture on the back of the box.

Glenn: Knowing the challenge ahead of time actually made it harder for that one. And you're right: we sat down and came up with the idea, and we thought about how you would play it and all Robin really wanted was the look of the game in progress without any rules.

Jake: I think we were okay with what Robin was saying, but we were a little bit confused too. But when he came in and clarified it was basically a licence to go completely crazy. So, things that we were thinking, “oh, we'll leave that out because that doesn't quite make sense.” We realised it didn't matter: we should totally put it in.

So that's where you'll hear on the episode where we had been discussing should we put the sky pathway in, and we weren't sure how that would actually work in the game dynamic. But then we realised it didn't matter. It was cool, so we should put it in. The same with Glenn’s secret level. That was a total non sequitur.

Glenn: It doesn't make any sense at all, but it looked cool.

Jake: It actually did but it looked nonsensical.

David: The other thing I noticed in that game challenge that you carried through to the final build with the Seal of Approval, is that you had a whole lot of stuff that wasn't connected to the build, but it was just laid out onto the table.

So, you had all the components that you would have in a game you had the tokens that are used to play the game, dice and all these other bits. So, it's like you open the box and all of this paraphernalia had fallen out.

And at the end of the final episode, when they were looking at the Seal of Approval. As Robin said, from every angle around the room, you could look at the build and figure out what it was that you'd built because there was evidence of the big seal of approval, there was a big glove with the thumbs up and Roger Wilco, the seal’s name, was on a name badge. There were all sorts of clues as to what it was from every angle.

You had filled the table up and the components weren't connected. You couldn’t move it as one complete model. I heard you say that you had an hour spare, and you just decided to throw other stuff at it.

Glenn: We had three criteria for the contents of the build: It either had to be marine life in the office, a 1980s office scene or some kind of “yes” approval type thing.

Jake: Preferably two or three of those things all at the same time.

David: Did you set those criteria or was it set for you?

Glenn: That was what we set.

Jake: Yeah, it was marine life in the office approving things. And so, it had to tick three of those boxes. So, things like the cup of coffee with the okay on it and the fishtail waggling. That was a really good one because it was all three.

And it was actually intentional because the thing we liked about that idea is that the world of the offices is expandable, so we weren't hemmed in by our idea. If we had time, we could keep adding things at different scales. So, we could have built a stapler for example, or a telephone or a fax machine or a filing cabinet. There was a lot of scope for expansion. We could add to it if we wanted to.

David: You had twenty-four hours. That must have been broken up into three separate build days.

Glenn: We had three eight-hour days. Plus, the little intro.

Jake: The judging was on day four, actually. We got to go home and just chill. We didn't know the result until the next day.

David: Talk me through that process. Do you go home and have a little conversation about where you got to and then have asleep, and then you reset yourself. On the TV show after about twenty minutes of the show, there's this quantum gear change.

Glenn: It’s interesting to get home at the end of the first build session because after eight hours we hadn’t got a lot done, and it's trying to divide the rest of the time up and what we think will get done based on what we've already completed. It's a bit of a balancing act. So, you have your “must-dos” and then your “like to-dos” and then “if we've got time to-dos.” That kind of thing.

Jake: We had LEGO at the Airbnb, so we could try things out. We had planned Roger a lot. We had a cardboard mock-up of him at full scale, so we could see him in 3D, and we had drawings and things, and we had colour drawings as well. But we hadn't worked out everything. So, for example, we hadn't worked out how to make the tick light up in time with the stamping. I had an idea, but we hadn't figured it all out, and we're wondering if that is important. And then Robin sidles up and says, “That's really important.” So, we're like, “Oh, crap, we have to do that.”

Glenn: The only thing we had worked out was how to make the seal.

Jake: And then Robin said he’d really want to see some movement around the head. So, I was like, all right, well, we're going to have to figure out what to do. And so, we had to sort all these mechanical problems solving that we could do back at the house. I couldn't really sleep until I'd done some of that stuff, because my brain just wouldn't let me: I couldn't turn off until I'd satisfied myself that I had a workable plan for the next day or some tactics at least.

Glenn: One thing that really stood out for me with the final build was just how in sync me and Jake were with the teamwork. It had been good from the start but by the end, we were just working back and forth, just in sync.

Jake: It's a shame we didn't see more of that on the television program. They showed a little bit of it, but I left out so much and there were all these moments where everything came together.

For example, the head, we decided we wanted to have a tongue-sticking-out mechanism, and so I was like, alright, well, you build the head and the leave some space for me to put the tongue and all the mechanism, and it came together so well. And all sorts of similar things, especially that water cooler at the end. We were flying at this stage.

David: Having an unlimited supply of parts and reasonably well sorted and a Brick Pit, so you can just go and reach for as many parts as you can certainly have been helpful.

Jake: For sure. Yeah.

David: Have you collaborated on LEGO building prior to this show?

Glenn: Only until the build-up to the show. We met back in 2016, as I think we said before, a LEGO show. And we've always wanted to do a collaborative build together but the fact we live two hours apart has always been a bit of an issue. So, on the build-up, we got together and set ourselves some build challenges.

Jake: We met up to build together several times. The first time we went to Glenn's house and my son came with me, and he set us the challenge of building a prop from a 90s movie, which was a very odd challenge, but it's fine.

They had to be a prop, not a scale model, but a one-to-one scale thing an actor would carry around: a prop not a model of a character. And so, we decided to do the box of chocolates from Forrest Gump after brainstorming for twenty minutes. And it turned out really well, so that was encouraging.

Glenn: It was a really good test of building together and just to realise that it was going to work; our teamwork was good, and we got along and agreed on stuff.

Jake: Just good communication. And then we didn't do a lot of building side by side like that except for the actual audition. But what we did do is we'd meet up on Microsoft Teams to brainstorm what we would do if we got a certain challenge, and we did things like a random Minifigure pack.

I just had a set of Minifigures, and I’d pull one out and say all right, well, it's this build but with this character, like on the Australian show where they did Minifig picks for superheroes who caught the supervillain headquarters and things like that.

And then we did s where we would both do a character but didn't tell each other what we were doing. Then we build a character, and then we would meet up briefly to swap them over, and then we've got each other's character built. We would build a scene for them

And so, we did a few other ones like that. And ones where we’d set a challenge and we both had a go of it. It wasn't really a collaboration, but we were working on that same sort of problem at the same time.

David: What are your backgrounds? I sense that you are both engineers or have an engineering background from the bridge that you built.

Jake: I'm not an engineer. I have an engineering-type background. I studied energy management at Otago. That's physics, but it's got a lot of engineering in it to be quite honest but not mechanical engineering. Not gears and motors and things like that. It's more boilers and wind turbines or solar panels. But mostly I learnt mechanics from LEGO, from actually just building LEGO and doing my MOCs and mucking around with motors and gears.

That's always what interested me the most about LEGO was making it move. I remember going to University, I remember seeing LEGO robotics for the day at the University. This is back in the 1980s, and I was just utterly enraptured with it.

I think that's the seed that was planted there. I got like Space LEGO and Technic LEGO and that's what I got for birthdays and Christmas and I just started combining them because I didn't have many bricks, so I put them all together. Those sorts of formative experiences put me on this track.

Glenn: My background, career-wise, is IT. And before I got back into LEGO around 2016, I was a scale model builder. So, I built race cars on a 1:20 to 1:25th scale and military modelling at a 1:25th scale. But the thing I found about that you are always trying to cram more detail in and once you're finished, basically you’ve built yourself an ornament. And you can’t do a thing with it but display it. The appeal with LEGO was I could build some amazing stuff, and when I’m done with it can be pulled apart and do something else with it.

David: Where to for you now. Is this sort of friendship and collaboration going to be something that continues? You're both based in the lower North Island?

Glenn: We’ve definitely got some ideas that we would like to have a go at collaborating for shows and things.

Jake: We’ve got so good at collaborating with LEGO Masters in real life. I think doing it virtually now will work a lot better. And being able to coordinate with each other.

Collaboratives where things are just like boxes that are stuck side by side, that's the sort of thing I've done before over distance for shows and things. But I think Glenn and I could probably go to the next level: Collaborating even though we're not physically present and sticking bricks on the same model.

Glenn: I agree.

David: And you're both just had the Wellington Brick Show. Are you both part of Well-LUG?

Glenn: Yep.

David: So, you're you've been part of Well-LUG prior to this, since about 2016.

Jake: I think that was both our first shows: 2016 one.

David: What really came through from all the episodes is that all twelve contestants that were competing got on really well. It looked like it was fun, you were all helpful to each other and there was this overarching collaboration to make the show really stand out. Is that a fair comment?

Glenn: Absolutely. We're all still good friends. We all pretty much talk on a day-to-day basis. We've got to chat group that we will talk in. We'll just get on and it sounds weird. I know it was a competition, but it didn't really feel like it a lot of the time. It just felt like building with good friends.

David: And that's certainly how it came across. It's a reality TV show, and it's a shame that people have to get eliminated, but that's part of how it works. And sometimes the eliminations were because the challenge for this particular episode wasn't in the strength area of the people that were eliminated, but they're really good builders or are really good cooks are really good at whatever it is the show's showcasing, but sometimes they've unlucky how the episodes have fallen in the order.

For some of them, the time was right, they were quite relieved to be eliminated because they were ready for it. In the last interview with Andrew and Georgie, they were just tired - exhausted.

Glenn: It was exhausting, it really was. To get through the whole thing you had to break it down - even episode by episode. You'd get in the morning and look forward to the morning breaks. And look forward to lunchtime, and then you look to the end of the day. And you just take it day-by-day. If you look too far ahead it was too daunting to think about what was in front of us.

David: Because you've succeeded, and you're the winners of the first series of LEGO Masters New Zealand. What advice would you give to people who were thinking of signing up for one of these series? What preparation and what would the commitment be?

Jake: It's an amazing experience. Sometimes you can talk yourself out of things and say, “Oh, maybe it wouldn't be so good” or, “I've got other things I need to worry about” and so forth.

Opportunities like this don’t come along very often and being able to focus on something that you love so intently was a joy for us. And I'm sure it would be for other LEGO fans. So definitely go for it.

Glenn: Be as creative as you can possibly be. Think fantastical big, bright, colourful creations. Be prepared to push yourself as hard as you can because you have to get through this and no idea is a bad idea.

Jake: It does really come down to bouncing ideas around and finding one which satisfies all these different criteria, and it's not easy but if you can get that right then you're in the hunt. But if you back the wrong idea and hold on to it too tightly, when it doesn't actually tick all of those boxes, then you're going to be in trouble, basically. And that's what I've seen in this show, and I've seen it in other shows as well. Even if you've got fantastic technique, and you show great skill but if the overall concept isn't quite hitting the mark, then it doesn't matter. It can't make up for that. It's just a simple idea. And you just sell it, sell it, sell it, sell it!

Glenn: The best story that makes sense is that the bricks can tell without you having to explain it. And I think a really important thing is a good teammate. Spend a lot of time together not just on the show, but outside, too. Pick someone that you will get along with and that you work well with.

Jake: I was delighted that Glenn said yes because I knew that not only was he an exceptionally good builder but was a hell of a nice guy that I could get on with. And that's absolutely crucial.

David: And Robin Sather, the world's first Lego Certified Professional from Canada. How was he? Did he seem to be quite a good choice for New Zealand? His Canadian and Commonwealth outlook sometimes matches how New Zealanders see the world?

Glenn: Not only was he really friendly and amazing guy, but he knows his stuff. Some of his calls were on another level, you know that the stuff he was looking for wasn't always totally obvious, but he knew what he was doing.

Jake: Absolutely. I understand all of his calls. In some senses it's subjective. He's got objective criteria, but there's still taste in it. But there was definitely a method and things that he was looking for. And different judges might have weighted things in a different way, but his calls made sense when you understood what he was looking for.

What he was looking for was something that was really appealing and amazing, even though it was on TV, that would be stunning if you were there in real life, too.

Glenn: Like all of us, he warmed up through the series. We were all a bit stiffer on the first episode because it was the first one and being on camera was all new. We found out our grove as we went through.

David: So, I'll finish here. Congratulations, Well done! Do you get one trophy? So, you're going to have it in each house for six months of the year?

Glenn: The plan is to build a second but in the meantime, we'll just timeshare with it.

David: Is there some lighting inside the trophy?

Jake: We thought was a power cord, but it’s actually a LED strip. It’s just a long, flexible LED strip with a USB cord and the cable the power brick to plug it into.

David: Again, Congratulations and Well Done!

Glenn and Jake: Thanks. Thank you. Bye now.

If you're in New Zealand, these episodes can still be downloaded from the TVNZ website.

You may be able to watch these episodes via a VPN from other locations.

Season Two of LEGO Masters NZ will screen towards the end of the year.

29 likes

5 comments on this article

LEGO Masters NZ - Finale (24)

By FlagsNZ in New Zealand,

@Synthia1980 said:
"You have pointed out who in the final in your preamble! Big spoiler! "

You're correct. I have edited them out now. Sorry for the spoiler.

LEGO Masters NZ - Finale (25)

By lordofdragonss in Poland,

I got tired of LM after first one.
Its was not about Lego it was about QUALITY ENTERTAIMENT.

LEGO Masters NZ - Finale (26)

By JayCal in Netherlands,

Great show, hope they get a better presenter in future though. Hamish in AU and Will US are just more fun to watch and set the bar quite high. Robin does a good job but Dai to me is just too bland. Especially when someone like Hamish absolutely killed it in the last season of AU.

Apart from that, I'm quite enjoying the teams and builds of the NZ episodes.

LEGO Masters NZ - Finale (27)

By Moriboe in Belgium,

Thanks for these interviews, they give some great insights! I enjoyed them, and the show.
The presenter may not be at the level of Hamish (big shoes to fill) but still better than US or NL/BE.

LEGO Masters NZ - Finale (28)

By Mockingjay2403 in New Zealand,

there should have been an episode where they had to build a farm animal. Then there could have been a cock. (the chicken)

LEGO Masters NZ - Finale (2025)

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