LEGO Masters NZ week four, episode eight is done! Week four saw one team go straight into the finale and the three remaining teams vie for the remaining two spots in the grand finale.
Each week we'll be bringing you an exit interview but to avoid spoilers for those of you watching on catch-up or via some illicit website in other countries we won't reveal their names above the fold.
If you're in New Zealand, these episodes can be downloaded from the TVNZ website.
GLENN AND JAKE
LEGO MATES
Glenn and Jake were the first team to receive a position in the Grand Finale of LEGO Masters NZ.
EMILY AND SARAH
MUMS
The second spot into the Grand Finale of LEGO Masters NZ was awarded to Emily and Sarah.
JONO AND DAN
BRICK BUDDIES
The third spot into the Grand Finale of LEGO Masters NZ was awarded to Jono and Dan.
This means that Andrew and Georgie were eliminated in Episode Eight of LEGO Masters NZ.
ANDREW and GEORGIE
FATHER AND DAUGHTER
David: I'm actually really sad to have to interview you tonight because I have really liked your builds and I think you're one of the more colourful teams on that show.
Georgie: Thank you. We really appreciate that.
Andrew: Yeah. That's lovely.
David: You are in a group of some really talented people and the decision about who stays and who goes must be a really difficult one.
Andrew: For sure. I definitely wouldn't have wanted Robin’s job. Some of the wins were obvious, and some were less so. But that's the judge's job, but he's got to do that.
David: I agree with you, I can understand some of the decisions that he's made. And I think that, for the most part, they're fair. I was just hoping that you two would get further than you got. So, I wasn't expecting to be interviewed new tonight.
Andrew: We were just glad to get not eliminated first. Nobody wants to be out first. So felt really sorry for Emily and Liam as well. We were there with them as the bottom two and if we were nervous there.
David: I think that there's a component in LEGO Master of how the challenges fall. Some people have strengths but if the challenge this day isn't in your strength area, then it's difficult for you to shine.
And I'm not talking about you two in particular, but there are different skill sets required for each challenge. For example, the skills required for the bungee bridge versus the monochrome build.
When I first spoke to you, we were commenting about the first two episodes, and you did the Rock Arch and the South African mine for the cricket ball canon. Since then, you've designed the bridge that performed reasonably well.
Andrew: Well, the winning bridge held twenty kilos and there were two bridges that held twenty kilos.
Georgie: Ours held ten kilos.
Andrew: There were two bridges that held ten kilos and ours was one of the ones that held ten kilos. And they showed them in a different order. And ours was of the last to be tested.
Georgie: You can see in the background of that episode and one of the shots when our unbroken build was in the background when it was the last team, and it's quite funny.
Andrew: So, we had actually seen all five of the bridges be smashed it. And I had a terrible sinking feeling about how ours was going to behave. And so, we asked for ten kilos and then, of course, there was no point in doing anything other than going to twenty-one. So, I said, “well, let's get to twenty-one.”
David: That's why I remember your build because you just went up by one kilo. I think one of the builds went to twenty kilos, and then they put it to twenty-eight. And I distinctly remember you saying, “you've got to go more than twenty, so let's do twenty-one.” And then you'd have stolen the show.
Andrew: The bridge challenge was really interesting in that the bridges all took a serious hammering on those early drops. And when we put ours together, I’d hung on it. Now I’m not a big person, but I’m still seventy-five kilos, and I'd hung on the thing statically, and it held my weight with no bother whatsoever.
So honestly, I thought we would cruise in with that challenge. But when you do that five or six times, things start falling apart.
David: Tell me about the cutaway build where you did the little red car that was cut down the middle. You had the Kiwi family driving the motorcycle sidecar with the learner plates. So, there were a lot of reasons to pick your interest when you're looking at it.
Andrew: I came along towards the end when it was more or less finished and Robin said, “was it exciting enough?” What were his words, Georgie? Do you remember?
Georgie: Was it “Out of the box,” something like that. He asked whether it was unusual enough or something?
Andrew: And I said, “When was the last time you saw three kiwis riding a motorcycle in the sidecar with a load of toilet rolls or hanging out the back?”
Georgie: I do remember that. Actually.
Andrew: We just looked at that build, and we laughed. It was a genuine reaction when we looked at it. And we laughed with each other. It was just so stupid.
Georgie: Yeah. It really was.
David: You do strike me as having had an enormous amount of fun.
Georgie: We were so proud of every single build we did. I don't know if any of the other teams can genuinely come away from every single build and say that what we put out there we’re really happy with. It's fun. It's got all the three things that you need to meet the criteria and stuff like that. We were honestly so proud of everything that we put out there. Elimination or not.
Andrew: We did have a lot of fun, George. We worked really well as a team. There was good banter, and some of that is obviously on the telly, and I get a little bit of flack, occasionally, from my daughter which you would expect, but overall, it was a lot of laughter and a lot of rewards and equally well was lots of fun time together.
You saw on Episode Seven where it wasn’t good, where we had to have a few minutes out to sort stuff out which I guess is really a function of pressure we were under.
David: Episode Seven was when you built the spaceship that was the game. You had the spaceships going slowly up and down with the planets spinning at the top. And there was a planet like Saturn with the rings, and some roller coaster segments moving up and down and lining up.
Georgie: I reckon one of the reasons why we got upset about it, as we did, is because obviously, we had known the brief beforehand. And we'd thought it was to build a game where you're making rules and things like that: a literal game.
And we'd planned every single detail to within an inch of its life. And then to have that change after emotionally investing in that idea two days prior was tough. But, we're still really proud of that build, and we think it looks great. Even though it's a load of nonsense and doesn't make any sense.
Andrew: Like George said, we had planned it almost to the point of, these are the rules, this is the gameplay, you start here, you do this, you move this, and you line your things up, and you eventually get your men to the top of the game. And then you’ve won!
And so, then within thirty minutes of the challenge starting, Robin turned up and said, “Oh, if I can see how to play you’ve failed.” And it was like, “ugh! Forty-eight hours of work down the drain!”
David: I sensed that you weren't the only team that got confused with the criteria for that game. And I think Dai, at one stage, summed it up by, “this challenge is the picture on the back of the box.”
Andrew: Out of all the briefs, I think that was the weakest in its presentation as an idea: If they had said you've got to build a game that we can play – happy days. But if they said early on in the piece, like two days previously, that you need to build a picture of a game then that would have been a bit different.
And so, as Georgie said, we were emotionally invested in this one idea and that idea of really got kicked into touch within half an hour of starting. It threw us utterly.
Georgie: I have spoken to the teams, and they agree with us that knowing the brief in advance, I don't really think that it was actually that much of an advantage.
Andrew: Maybe if the brief had been clearer.
David: You earned the Power Brick for the Pink Pig build, and you got Dai Henwood for an hour. It was almost like you sent him to the Brick Pit just to get him out of the way.
Georgie: I personally think the Power Brick, given what potential advantages Emily and Sarah could have with it to avoid the elimination, but even before that, the ways that they could have used it were a lot better than the options that we were given.
I think that if they were going to hand the Power Brick over to somebody else then they should have perhaps made it clear right from the beginning that we couldn't actually use it to bypass an elimination because when I got it in Episode Five, I got really emotional because I thought, “oh, okay, well, I know, there's only one more elimination left, but we have the Power Brick, so we'll be fine.” We can get into the final and everything.
But we weren't told that until Episode Seven that actually that wasn't the case. But even then, the advantages that we could have got with it, were definitely sub-par. I was literally talking to Emily today about this. I think that if they're going to use something like the Power Brick again, in future seasons, I think that that should be considered.
Dia was actually quite helpful in the episode where we had him for an hour, and he got us into figuring out what the brief really was. But it wasn't Power Brick worthy. I mean no offence, Dai, if you're reading this: we love you. But compared to what Emily and Sarah could have had with the Power Brick, it just wasn't the same.
David: I actually agree with exactly what you're saying. The vision I have is that if you think your model that you've designed is a strong one, you can withhold the Power Brick and you take the risk. If you think you're in the weakest two or three teams you can surrender it and guarantee that you won't be eliminated.
And then you get this advantage and I can completely appreciate how you felt about that. All of a sudden, “oh, we're still going to be in an elimination round.” And you don't have this forcefield protection that's around us.
It was like the rules got changed overnight.
Andrew: That's right. It felt like they hadn’t thought it through.
David: The chameleon. Right at the end of last night's show, Georgie you with your chameleon, the little Easter egg? No one had picked that up. Do you want to talk about that?
Georgie: I don't even know how that came about. I'd never actually seen the chameleon pieces before, and I was, “Oh, these are quite cool. What if I just use one in every build?” I think it was in Episode One. We were foraging through the Brick Pit and I said, “look at these.”
And from there it became a bit of an in-joke. You would have seen in that montage that in Episode Six when I showed the chameleon to our little desk camera because that was the monochrome challenge, and you couldn't just have a turquoise chameleon on the outside of it. I was showing everyone how I used the chameleon, and it's going to go in the scaffolding.
The cameraman quickly caught on that I was doing this thing so that they'd purposely get shots of where the chameleons were. And the whole idea of me doing this, once I'd decided that it was going to be a thing, was going to be something for viewers at home to try and find the chameleon every single time. I was really quite touched to see that they showed this at the end of the show.
Andrew: That was a nice touch.
Georgie: Dad and I actually watched last night's episode together, which was nice, because we hadn't actually seen any of them together, and it was really cool to see that at the end.
David: Now it's your signature. Are you involved with a LUG?
Georgie: I am in the Otago LUG at the moment. Okay, because I'm in Dunedin for Uni. So, we're going to be displaying at the Cromwell Brick Show later this month.
David: But now there's an expectation that whenever you do a build, there'll be a chameleon. That's your signature. I think I've got a chameleon somewhere. It's in one of the modular buildings. I think the chameleon is in a fish tank.
David: Let’s talk about your last build. Your train station. The above and below build.
Andrew: So, there was a quote by one of the Australian contestants that that was really two builds in one: the evil character above and below and mashed together. And to be honest, we had it in our mind that Robin asked us to do an evil baddies layer. We had a tube station, but our tube station is going to be an abandoned station: a tube station full of dust and cobwebs and everything and all of the action would have been effectively on our top build.
And so, when it turned into the above and below thing. We'll have normal on the top, and we'll have all this horrid stuff going on down the bottom. The table was set up it had these Technic beams glued up underneath. So really, we just measured it out and built ourselves what was underneath. I built up the whole thing on the top of the desk and then with just minutes to spare just connected it up: we didn't do anything else. Didn’t we George?
Georgie: No. We didn't do any actual building underneath. Whereas Emily and Sarah did a fair bit of theirs underneath, didn’t they?
Andrew: Yeah, they built theirs as individual bases. They were actually putting them together underneath. Emily. Sarah was on that creeper thing for hours. That was one way to deal with the problem. And they reckoned it was great so, you know, fair play for them.
But what we were really pleased about with that was the curved wall effect. Georgie put that together based on an idea I'd had, and it was brilliant. I loved it.
Georgie: I managed to get the lettering into the wall. I think that was really cool.
David: Yes. I’ve looked at that. I’m a great train enthusiast and I want to make a multi-layered train display that is very modular, so I can just take it out of the back of a station wagon and set it up on a big table and create big cityscape with two or three underground tube layers underneath it. And I'm going to be looking at your curved wall and saying, “how did they do that?” I'm sure there were some illegal techniques in there somewhere.
Andrew: Every single joint was out of tolerance.
Georgie: It was basically built like a wall along and then to create the actual curve you push a one-by six-plate going backwards, and you put a one-by-one brick on there on one end and two one-by-one plates on the other, and then another one-by-six on top. So, then you had this curve going up that had two plates on one end and a brick on the other.
So you sort of have a two to three ratio curve. It took forever. It took me many, many hours. But I’m stoked with how it looked. It was so cool.
Andrew: We had a little panic mechanic down on the bottom running around and the lights. It was great.
David: Has it changed the way you build LEGO?
Andrew: I'll be brutally honest. We were absolutely over it when we arrived home. And I couldn’t bear to see another LEGO brick in my life!
Georgie: The relief when we were finished was quite surprising. I think we were more relieved than sad.
Andrew: Definitely. The pressure was over. We were knackered and so when Robin said that we were going home, I remember thinking it whatever it was a relief.
Georgie: I don't know about you dad, but I was relieved as well that it was us and not the others. I mean, because you could potentially argue that with all the components and things that we've put in, and maybe we had more technical finesse than some other builders in that episode.
But just from the sheer passion for LEGO and its importance in these people's lives, for the others in that episode, it was so much more for them than for us. They look like they live and breathe LEGO whereas like for us, it's probably not even 10% of our spare time.
I dance; I do music; we ski; dad and his singing; we run; there's a lot of other stuff in our lives. And of course, LEGO is something that gives us joy, but it’s certainly not to that same extremely passionate extent that those others felt.
So, I'm just I was genuinely so stoked and that's why I said what I said at the end of the episode. It's so much more meaningful to them, I think.
Andrew: So, it's good to get as far as we got, but I certainly didn't go home and cry into my pillow.
David: Amongst the LEGO community, you are minor celebrities, and you are the contestants in the first series of LEGO Masters New Zealand, which is something to be proud of. And you are all gathering at the Christchurch Brick Show which will be a pretty special moment, and you will be the celebrities: where everyone will want to talk to you about your stuff.
Georgie: Today was the first time I got recognised by someone in public: that I was on the show, and I was very, very humbled by that. It doesn't matter that she was a five-year-old girl: I'm still I'm going to take that one. At sure that at the Brick Show It'll be a bit different.
David: What are you studying at university?
Georgie: I'm a music student. So, I'm doing a double major in composition and piano.
David: I have two talented stepsons who are piano teachers, and so we listen to the piano all the time.
David: It's been really great to catch up with you. And it's nice to hear that it's not the end of the world for the two of you, and I've been it's really great watching that show. I think that was put New Zealand LEGO on the map.
Andrew: As you say, we were so proud, and I think probably that Robin would say that the builds so far are world-class. They have been absolutely superb, so we should be justifiably proud of what we have achieved, and I really hope that any future LEGO Masters series is as successful. Apparently, our series is rating very highly, and I think that's great.
Georgie: It's such a privilege to have been part of that first series, but I think that us as a cast really did it justice: our builds were certainly not any worse than what’s seen overseas by any means.
And just because we had fewer teams or a slightly smaller studio, that doesn't mean that we're any less than those overseas shows, and I'm just really proud of the whole production and, just humbled, too.
David: I agree. The set design, the look, everything is equivalent to what you find out elsewhere. I agree that because they're showing two episodes a week, I'm now writing the week four exit interview for episode eight and next week it's going to be over: I'm going to write this and post it on Sunday and then on Monday, it's the finale.
But that's a function of only having six teams and then a budget for a LEGO community that's got five million viewers.
Andrew: If somebody said what could they improve, the only thing I would think was probably worthy of changing in a big way is the length of each episode: where it's nominally an hour, but cut that down due to ads, and you are down to forty-five minutes. And because of that, they tended to concentrate on the human angle, and less on technical LEGO.
And of course, the LEGO nerds in the audience want to see the builds and talk about the people and the interaction and the banter is a little bit secondary. So, if the show is rating highly and selling advertising then you could imagine that they could make each episode a bit longer and try to put a little bit more of each of them: this is a technique they’ve used, this is the mechanisms and just try and angle it towards the real enthusiasts a little bit more. Strike a balance, and you could do that if you added another 20 minutes in.
Georgie: I mean, there's so much that the audience doesn’t in general. Like, there's over one hundred hours of footage for every episode, And that’s just crazy. And it's like, oh, they missed that, or they missed that.
David: And as you've already pointed out when it's edited, it might not be in chronological order.
Andrew: I think they've done a very, very good job in how it’s stacked up in terms of the comparable program. And neither I nor Georgie knows what happens on Monday so we're hanging out for a surprise.
David: Well, it's been nice to catch up with you. Thanks for this. And all the best. Bye now.
Andrew and Georgie: Bye. Thank you.
LEGO Masters NZ
The Final episode of Series 1 of LEGO Masters NZ will screen tomorrow at 7:30 pm, 6 June 2022 on TVNZ 2.
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1 comment on this article

By Freddy_Hodson in United Kingdom,
It's a good job I'm not on this show, because if I'd lost after *that* model I can't help thinking I'd have just torched the place in revenge.