Talking LEGO with Tim and Zach from LEGO MASTERS

Last week on LEGO Masters, the competitors had to create a structure that could stand up to the Brickter Scale. The stronger the building, the better the team fared. Also, the buildings had to be at least 4 feet tall. At the end of the day, three teams came in at the bottom with buildings falling apart at an 8 and one of those teams was eliminated from the competition. Tim & Zach, the father and son duo, were sadly the ones to leave. Fox gave me the opportunity to ask the pair a couple of questions and I’ve shared them below.

Tommy: This week's challenge was more of a technical one with the need to create a solid structure. This is in contrast to previous builds where the challenge had to do more about story and aesthetic. What are some of the things you like and dislike about each kind of challenge?

Zach: That's a long question. So, the three that we were on, you have the parade float, which was almost all aesthetic, except for the moving part, which still was kind of aesthetics. I prefer building that way. In fact, I don't build at all with motion generally, so I liked the landscape and I like doing castle set ups and stuff like that. I like to lean towards the aesthetically pleasing and not the technical. Obviously you need the technical side to build some of the aesthetic stuff. But stuff that's going to go through like an earthquake; not really my choice in building and I probably would say that I'm weaker in the Technic grip area, for sure. That's where I'm at.

Tim: There was still a story involved and they've always told us that there are specifics. It's just as much technical as it is story. It's like a 50/50 kind of a spread, so we did actually have a story. You heard a little bit of the story with the cats. As far as the aesthetics of it and the actual detail of it, just quite frankly, we ran out of time. We didn't have enough time to be able to put in some of those details again, with an eight hour type of a build on a four foot tall building. We had to put block down, we had to get that completed to be able to deliver something. But if I'm contrasting that like what you're asking the story and the aesthetic part of it with the actual build part of it. Yeah. It was different. The challenges are different. That's why they call it Master instead of Amateur. It's just, you have to kind of stretch your skill sets and try to apply all of the things that you learned the applications as far as the different Technic pieces or other types of styles of building. I liked the story part of it. The thing that I liked the most is telling stories and being able to create and craft the story. I don't really like just to build just to build, cause it doesn't mean anything other than it's just a building, so I didn't like this last challenge nearly as much as I liked the previous two, simply because I'm a storyteller and I love being able to craft the story and the experience rather than just saying, "oh yeah, we built this for a technical side of things." I'm not the engineer type. So yeah. That's where we're at with that.

Tommy: Once you found out you were going to be competing on LEGO Masters, was there any kind of training regimen that you put into place for the show?

Zach: That's a good question. I think both dad and I, or my dad, or Tim, whatever you want to call him, would have a big pow-wow where we looked at some of the designs we've already done. We looked at like the techniques that we did with those designs and we went, "If we come to something like this, where we need this technique, this is kind of what we're going to do," so that both of us were on the same page. Dad still to this day gets tiles and plates mixed up and always, always messes them up all the time. He'll know what he's talking about and he'll go and get the right one, but he'll tell me he's going to get plates, and I'm like, "what are you doing? Why are you doing this?" But he would just mess up the word, all the time. That was our training process.

Tim: Yeah. Zach and I got together on a couple of different things to make sure that we knew some of the techniques that we were going to use for specifics, whether it was a Lowell Sphere or things like that. That would be some of the things that we kind of got together and say, "Hey, this is what we want to make sure we are using. These are some of the techniques to be able to put into it." The other thing that we did, was a lot of research and just watching LEGO Master season one again, and going back into some of the other things, just to kind of get an idea of what to expect, and just to be honest with you, you don't actually get a full grasp of watching the show versus what is actually going on. Some of the challenges after they presented us the challenge we would try to do any kind of research if we had time to do research, but most of the time we didn't. It was just, here's what we got and let's just go with it. So you draw back in on some of the experience that you had previously. So yeah, it was a tough way to be able to jump into it and prep as far as any kind of education part of it because you never know what the challenges are that they're going to show and we didn't know until Will [Arnett] said, "this is your challenge. This is for this episode. This is your challenge." We didn't have any idea what they were going to give us.

Tommy: Do you know what your BPH is?

Zach: No, I don't. I've never done that. I wouldn't like to say I'm a lazy builder, but I like to take my time on building. If I'm going to put a tree, I kind of go, "all right, where do I want this tree? Do I want to put it here?" And then I move it. I take my sweet time on building and I'm not sitting there counting all the bricks that I'm putting on and timing myself or anything like that. So no, I have not the slightest clue.

Tim: I do not know what my BPH is. We've never tested that. We've never actually gone into that.

Tommy: What was the highlight of being on LEGO Masters as a father and son team?

Zach: I really enjoyed being able to do it with you (Tim). It was a long, long, long process, but it was months of painful everything, but it was good. It's just a long process of doing stuff and it's a lot of stress, but it was an awesome experience. Once in a lifetime experience. I'm not really sure how to answer that question.

Tim: Again, it was all about the experience and the ability to be able to spend time with my son. That was really the main thing is to be able to connect with him, so that at the end, obviously there was a whole monologue that Zach did, but it really, really made a big difference. And just kind of showed the appreciation that he had for us spending that time together. So that was definitely the highlight.

Tommy: What is a LEGO building tip that you would give to a new builder?

Zach: I'm still gonna stand on this. I separate all my preset pieces. Any LEGO disagrees with me, but this is my opinion. LEGO set always tells you to do it by color. See, now my problem is is you do it by color and you put them in a big old bin. You're never going to find the right part, it is all purple or all blue. You're looking at a sea of blue. Now, if you put all the different types of pieces that are the same type, and then all of the mixture of colors, then you can pick out the color cause you can be like, "oh, I need a blue jumper plate by two by two or whatever. Okay. There it is. Let me pull it out." Not hard. But if you put a blue jumper plate two by two, in a sea of blue blocks and the Ttechnic beams and all of a sudden stuff, you're never finding that jumper plate. It's going to fall to the bottom and it's over. So that's how I look at it. That's my advice. I would separate by brick and not by color, contrary to what other people think.

Tim: I would tell you, this is amazing. It's funny cause I come at it from a different angle as far as from the technical side. The one thing that I can say is it really is a mental game. Whether it is something in regards to a technique or you have to have the mindset that you're going to figure it out, too many people get frustrated with things too quickly and then they give up on them. So the one thing that I can really recommend as far as for a new builder is just practice and learn that it's okay to fail. It's okay to mess up. It's okay to come up with something that looks kind of a little bit ugly because it's all a part of the process. It's all the learning experience. So just don't give up and just keep practicing.