In between his time organizing and planning the 2019 edition of Brickspo, Regina’s Ray Morton also just happens to be a pretty good Lego designer himself.
Morton had several creations on display during the annual celebration of the tiny building blocks at the Western Development Museum this past weekend – and while they weren’t the expansive and sometimes breathtaking scenes put together by others, the intricacy of his work was most certainly on display.
“There’s always some trial and error, I’m an engineering technologist so I have a bit of a mechanical background,” Morton said in explaining his work. “There are some limitations with Lego, and it’s a challenge to meet and exceed those limitations and build the most interesting things possible.”
For himself, that often involves the addition of motors to his builds, with impressive results.
Take the ‘injured’ Star Wars AT-AT walker that rocked back and forth in pain holding its knee, for example.
“That’s right from pop culture and Family Guy,” Morton said. “Sometimes I’ll just see something and be inspired, and I saw the Lego set for it and I thought ‘there has to be a way to put a motor in this’. Turns out there was and it turned out pretty well.”
Or The Tripod, depicting a scene from War of the Worlds, complete with a proximity sensor that brought the machine to life if anyone came near.
“We actually had a build contest where it had to be something involving the number three, and tripod is three legs, so throw a motor in it and a sensor and scare the kids,” Morton said with a laugh.
And the most intricate of all, a mock-up of the scene from Spiderman: Homecoming where Peter Parker literally walks vertically around his room.
“The idea for the layout that was pitched is that you’re driving through a scene that’s being filmed, and my options were pretty limited,” Morton explained. “I was thinking I could do a helicopter or airplane scene, but that day I watched Spiderman and Peter Parker was going around his room, so I was wondering how they did that. And (the build) is how they did that. They actually rotated the room and Peter walks on the wall, the ceiling and floor.”
In addition to Morton’s smaller works, Brickspo patrons could also check out expansive Star Wars displays from The Empire Strikes Back and The Clone Wars, a fully detailed build of a large city neighbourhood, large-scale scenes from various fantasy movies and even detailed pieces of artwork, including 3D portraits of Stan Lee and the Dali Lama by prolific Lego artist Jim Jo. And, of course, Trevor Lien’s always-popular Rube Goldberg machine, The Great Ball Contraption.
“With Lego, the sky is the limit, and the builder will usually build what they know or something they’re passionate about, spaceships and whatnot,” Morton said. “And we had some guys who do just mosaics, so you see a lot of that in the arts section… It’s a well-rounded group of builders so we try to put on a well-rounded show with a bit of everything.”
There’s no question the entire event is wildly popular – a steady stream of patrons flowed through the WDM doors throughout the two days Saturday and Sunday, with attendance figures expected to be well into the thousands by the time all is said, done and counted up.
“So far it’s been very successful, everyone has been happy,” Morton said as things wrapped up during Saturday’s show. “We made a couple of changes this year, we spread out through the museum and it’s been beneficial for people looking at the displays because the crowds aren’t show bunched up any more. So it’s been a lot of fun.”
