Leaving LEGO Masters: An interview with the sixth team to leave [Feature]

LEGO Masters aired its sixth episode last week where contestants built a Storybook created by kids. The Brothers Brick had the opportunity to sit down with the eliminated team and talk about their experience, diversity and representation, and how they prepared to be on the show.

In our interview, the team talks about which challenge they wished they could have done better and how the cast has become more of a family. If you haven’t yet watched the episode, be warned that there will be spoilers!

If you’ve watched the episode, by now you’ll know we’re talking about Richard and Flynn–the very Flynn who contributes to The Brothers Brick!

Are you two life-long LEGO builders, or did you go through a dark age?

Richard: I built a lot as a kid. Not so much sets that were dedicated to a theme, but I remember getting all kinds of bricks and being very excited when I got my first windows. This was the mid-’60s and early ‘70s. Then I think I sold all of my bricks at a garage sale for something – I don’t even remember – when I was a young teenager, and then picked it up with Flynn about three and a half or four years ago.

Flynn: I had some LEGO sets as a kid, but I wasn’t an avid builder at that time of my life. I was involved in a lot of theatre, chorus, and after school stuff. So, I didn’t really have a whole lot of time for building, unfortunately. I was also an early adopter of video games and cable TV, so there you go! [laughs] But then, like Richard was saying, about four years ago we picked up a set and just really enjoyed it. It kind of all went from there.

What set was it specifically that brought you out of the dark age and onto LEGO Masters?

Flynn: We were looking for something to do that wasn’t sitting in front of a TV. So, I went out, and the funny thing is that I can’t even remember why I picked the LEGO set. It just seemed like it was fun. It was the X-Men vs. the Sentinel set, and it had Wolverine and Storm minifigs. I was super into X-Men as a teenager, and they’re two of my favorite characters. I figured that was a good “in” to the hobby. Although, at the time, we didn’t expect it to become a hobby. It was just something that we bought to do one time. But…

Richard: It stuck! [laughs]

Flynn: It stuck. [laughs]

Richard: We had a lot of fun building that set, and because it came with minifigures, we played with them and made little adventures for them. My birthday was a couple of months later and Flynn bought me a bulk lot of about 20 lbs. of bricks. I hadn’t seen most of the types of bricks before. I’d never heard of Technic either, so that was all brand new. We just started sorting and making little things. It snowballed from there.

During the last few episodes you expressed some disappointment about how the challenges turned out. Looking back, would you do anything differently if you could?

Richard: We would have built a stronger bridge for episode six! [laughs] I’m actually really happy with the design of the truss on our bridge and the colorwork that we did. But our racing car was a very poor design and it didn’t finish the race. That cost us 25 minutes which meant that we didn’t have any big plates to make our roadway with. If I could do that episode again, we’d make a better car that had a higher axle that didn’t bite onto the roadway.

By and large, I am really happy with what we made, including the storybook challenge we went home on. If we had more time and more experience building 3D characters, or advanced 2D characters, then I probably would have opted for that. But I think it was a strong design and I am proud of it.

Flynn: I feel the same way. You know, we’re not architects or bridge builders. I’ve built bridges on a small scale with my students, but nothing to the scale you saw on the show. That was a really big build in a very short amount of time. I’m ultimately happy with the design. And I feel the same way about our storybook challenge. I was actually really happy with it. That’s what we could express with our particular talent and knowhow. I also redesigned our characters several times before we got to the end. I was really happy with our storybook and illustrated look. It just wasn’t what the judges were looking for.

Richard: In the storybook challenge, we wanted to make a pop-up book that was also a toy that children could play with. Rather than having lots of mechanization, we built it so a child could press one button and it would move the figures from the left into the house and vice versa. You could also turn on the “magic” in the background with little sparkles on a chain. They didn’t show them moving in the episode, but that had a play function. The spaceship could be lifted up, and the weed monster came out of the ground as well.

Flynn: We made a lot of play functions that we thought would be great for a kid, but I think the Brick Masters were looking for something else–something larger and maybe more sophisticated. I think they weren’t on board with the direction we were headed.

If you could have designed a challenge to show off what you can personally do with LEGO, what would that have been?

Richard: I really liked the amusement park challenge, but that started the second we got on set. We didn’t know where any of the bricks were, and we didn’t know how the flow of the days would go. I would love to do the amusement park challenge again, but with more experience further into the season. We love amusement parks and immersive attractions. We’ve done that before in a couple of our large pieces. So, in a challenge with no limitations where you can dig deep and build, then I would love to go back and do some spooky, immersive attraction.

Flynn: If we could do the storybook challenge again, I would have liked to have the time and the small parts to really detail those characters, rather than make them super flat the way they were. Ultimately, I was happy with the way it came out. But there’s always room for improvement!

What’s your biggest takeaway from the whole LEGO Masters experience?

Richard: I have two. First, I have learned I really don’t like building on a clock! [laughs] I like competition, and we love board games, so I love the game aspect of it. That was very challenging. But, in our own personal builds, we like to try things multiple ways. If it doesn’t work, we take it apart and we learn from it and build it again, or correct it tomorrow, or change the colors, or the parts. So, I think I’ve learned for myself that I don’t really love building under pressure. I think it goes against the free-flowing quality of the design process.

The second takeaway is to trust in our abilities. Flynn and I are not the same person. We have different skills that mesh well together. I’ve learned it’s ok for us to take on big things that we don’t fully know how to do yet because, given effort and focus, we’ll figure it out. We’re taking on a couple of commissions right now that are very challenging, but I have a lot more trust in the way that we’re able to work together and come up with things that we’ve never experienced before.

Flynn: One takeaway for me is that I have found the gaps in our LEGO knowledge and the places where I feel like I could improve. But really the big takeaway is the friendships that we made with the other contestants. We really are a big family, and the community aspect of LEGO is one of my favorite things about the hobby. I feel like all of the contestants really exemplified that community spirit and that spirit of support.

Did working on the clock take away from the experience, and would you do it all again?

Flynn: I don’t know that it took away the enjoyment of it. It certainly added an extra bit of pressure that we weren’t used to. But I still enjoyed being there and creating all the stuff that we did. Would I do it again? Yes, absolutely, because I certainly feel like I would know a lot more going into it now than I did when we went into it the first time. I know we mentioned we’ve only been building for three and a half to four years, so this was really all new to us.

Richard: I don’t think the clock took away enjoyment, but it definitely changed the experience. Like I said, we love playing video games and board games. So, I love the game quality of it, the game mechanics, and the twists really fired my imagination. It also pressured us to really keep going. I wouldn’t do that for our own personal MOCs! That clock guy would have taken us weeks to build in our personal life. But because we didn’t have weeks, because we only had a small number of hours, we really just pushed and pushed–and excelled beyond what we thought we could do in a short period of time. So, the clock was a pressure that I think really made us perform a lot more than we thought we could.

Quite a few episodes have featured twists, and the randomness of the Storybook Challenge twist seemed even more difficult. As we are nearing the end of the season, what part does luck play in the challenges?

Flynn: I felt this way throughout the whole competition, but especially as it got shorter and shorter–one good day could do amazing things for you, and one bad day could be detrimental. When you’re talking about luck, we all have good and bad days. We have days, even when working on a single MOC, where you’re really into it, you’re in the groove and everything is great. Then you have other days where you go to the same project and start to work on it and nothing is working. At home in those situations, you have the time off the clock to solve those problems. But when you’re on the clock like on the show, you don’t have the chance to solve those problems. It was just one good or bad day that could make or break the whole situation.

Richard: I think luck played a part in that all of the teams had different skill sets. Certain challenges were going to resonate with some teams better than others. In the Storybook Challenge, for example, Tyler and Amy know characters inside out–that is their main thing that they do. This was perfect for them. We did have some challenges with the weed monster and the spaceship to make them fit our plan to make a pop-up book that was a toy children could play with. So, we were limited in size. I wanted to make a lever that could lift the spaceship that a child could operate so the weight and size of the spaceship were limited in order to be able to do that. In the end, the judges weren’t impressed with the scale of our spaceship, but I was really happy with the weed monster.

The child who was partnered with us, Noelle, was incredibly imaginative and she gave us a lot to go on. I think we expressed what she wanted us to express but that’s also different than impressing the judges. I will point out that for this challenge, like with each episode incrementally, they judged a lot more harshly. They really dug deep–they loved Mark and Boone’s piece, and yet they were very critical of it as well. So, everything is a lot harder the closer and closer you get to the finale.

You’re a married gay couple which is still rare on reality television. Several episodes have shown some touching moments between you. Are you happy with how your relationship has been portrayed by the show?

Flynn: I was really happy with the way that they portrayed our relationship. They certainly seem to like us hugging! [laughs] With Mark and Boone it was a high five, or a chest bump or a cool handshake. We each had our own thing, and we got the hugging. I was really happy with the way they portrayed it. I’m glad that they didn’t make a huge deal out of it–we were there just like the newlyweds Tyler and Amy were there.

Richard: I’m also very happy with the way we were portrayed. We got on the show being ourselves through the casting process, so we decided if that’s who they wanted, that’s who we would be. So we just laid our cards on the table. We’re not big into public displays of affection–you won’t see us making out on the show or anything–but we do reassure one another. You probably don’t see it on the show as much, but Flynn reassures me as much as I reassure him. I agree with Flynn–I like the fact that they didn’t make a big deal about it but just presented us as these people who are LEGO builders who happen to be a gay married couple. That was where I would like to be with visibility. It’s the of the opposite of marginalization–we are who we are and that’s not a big deal.

Speaking as someone who is 53, I came out in the late ‘80s, and I never saw people like me on television at all. I didn’t see myself on game shows. The gay characters I saw either died before the end of the show or were villains or were the butt of a joke. So to see two people who are in love, following their passion for making art together on television, that means a lot to me and to my teenage self. My young adult self would have been blown away by not only the fact that I was married and it was okay, but that we could be on TV just being ourselves. Both of those things are important to me. It was moving, and hurray for Fox and Endemol Shine (production company) for putting together a diverse cast.

What type of reaction have you received from the public?

Flynn: There have been a few negative comments you ignore, but it’s been overwhelmingly positive from the general public. The LEGO community in particular has been wonderful. We had an opportunity to go to Bricks Cascade. We were blown away by the welcoming, friendly, generous atmosphere of the whole thing and that spanned from the convention attendees all the way to the public. People waited an hour and a half to meet us and talk to us. They were so excited to be there. We had a lot of people tell us how important it was to them that we were on the show and that we were representing the gay community. We were just being ourselves, but I’m so glad that that could make people feel represented.

We’ve learned from our interviews that that cast felt like a family, especially considering how emotional people have been when a team is sent home. Did you feel the same closeness with Brick Masters Amy and Jamie and host Will Arnett?

Flynn: We had great interactions with them. It was part of the rules that we were not allowed to interact with the judges while the show was on. Not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t want there to be any accusations of favoritism. We really had to keep things a bit of arm’s length from them and keep it professional. But at the same time, Will was hilarious. I feel he was a very empathetic host. When things were getting really tense, even though sometimes you really needed that time to build, it was always fun having him come over and break the tension a little bit with his jokes and just being silly. I did get a chance to speak with both Amy and Jamie after the fact and let them know how inspirational they were to me as a builder, and especially someone coming in new to the hobby.

Richard: I would agree with Flynn. All of our interactions with Will Arnett and with the Brick Masters were on-camera while we were on-set. I found Will to be clever and fast and very empathetic. We had a very long build during the Mega City Challenge, and he came over at a certain point and just sat down in our area and chatted with us. It was so great. We were surrounded in a sea of bricks, and we’re trying to move really, really quickly, but he just connected with us genuinely in a way that I really appreciated. While the Brick Masters were very good at keeping their distance and following the rules, I did see them react a couple of times. Like with the clock man, when they came around from the back and saw the front, I saw this huge smile grow on Brick Master Amy’s face. Then she looked up and saw I was looking and she doused it. [laughs] There were a lot of special little moments. I just feel great about all of it. The crew was highly professional and very understanding too—even when they accidentally broke things when there were a lot of cameras moving around.

Other than the time limit, what was the most difficult aspect of the challenges for you?

Flynn: For me, it would be not having time to think and design. That was the hardest part because your design time was part of your clock time. So when you have an eight-hour challenge, you throw in design time and suddenly becomes a seven and a half-hour challenge or even a seven-hour challenge. Not having that time to plan ahead can sometimes cause trouble a little bit later down the line.

Richard: For me, aside from the clock, being miked all day–just the documentation of all of it was very challenging. When Flynn and I are building in our dining room and we have a disagreement about a color or how a mechanism should work, we disagree amicably then talk it out. But when you have a microphone and they’re documenting what you’re saying and you know they’re going to ask you about it later, it can come across as conflict. You don’t want to say, “No, I disagree with you,” because they might come up later in the interviews where they’d ask, “Hey, at 4:33 pm you said you disagreed, what does that mean?” The fact that everything was documented and was going to be on TV meant that there was a lot of pressure to keep going and not to disagree about things. I think we managed it well. We didn’t have any major disagreements and we did keep on going. And honestly, I’m glad that it was documented because even though we didn’t get to keep the models we created, we have beautiful video of it and have been able to share it with millions of people.

Have you been to other LEGO conventions before LEGO Masters? How has your experience at them changed since being on the show?

Flynn: Our very first LEGO convention we went to was Bricks by the Bay. I remember we didn’t know anything about it. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t drive, we didn’t bring anything–we took the train down and had to leave early. We didn’t even go to the different ceremonies and classes. We had no idea. But we made friends with people pretty much right away. And then the next year we brought things we built and took home a trophy! We’ve also been to Bricks LA. We went there actually this year right before the show premiered. People that we knew already were like, ‘Oh, you’re going to be on the show!’ or they’d heard about it. But all of us in the cast who were there agreed that this is the last event we’ll go to where we will be sort of incognito or that people won’t know who we are.

None of us realized the extent at which that would bear out when we went to Bricks Cascade. It was kind of a perfect storm. The show was airing and it was right in the middle. Most of the cast was still on the show. I never experienced anything like that in my life. Like I said, people were waiting an hour and a half to get our autograph or take a picture. And then we would leave the autograph station and try to go eat lunch or go to the bathroom and we would get stopped every five feet. We had to keep sort of inching our way towards the door. A lot of them were kids and I can’t say no to a kid who wants to talk about LEGO. So it was definitely a very strange experience. I think a wake-up call is a good word to use. But yeah, it was a very, very interesting change of situation.

Richard: There was a big difference for me between the kind of attention we got for our LEGO MOCs before LEGO Masters and the kind of attention that we’ve gotten since. For two years in a row, we brought big mechanical creations to Bricks by the Bay and Bricks LA. Those mechanical creations would need a little babysitting to make sure everything continued running smoothly. Flynn was basically a carnival barker standing out front and talking with people as they came up and enjoyed the piece while I stayed more behind the scenes, nudging things here and there to keep things running. Both of those pieces seemed to be very popular. People liked them and they wanted to talk to us about that piece: “Is this a unicorn or is this a Pegasus? How did you make the fingers move? How long did it take you? How many bricks is it?” Yet since being on the show, people also are interested in us personally not just in what we build. They want to ask us about our relationship, about what our personal experience was like being on the show. So being known as human builders, I think is a different experience than being behind a piece with people being only curious about what you build.

Do you have any plans to go to any other LEGO conventions this year?

Richard: That’s kind of up in the air now. I think if the current situation were to evaporate, we were looking forward to BrickCon in Seattle, BrickWorld in Chicago and BrickFair in Virginia. But yeah, we definitely have plans to go to them eventually and hopefully if everything goes right we’ll go to Skaerbek this year in Denmark. We’re crossing our fingers for that one.

Do you think that being a contributor to The Brothers Brick and attending LEGO conventions like Bricks by the Bay helped you get cast for the show?

Flynn: I think it was really about our builds because you have to remember that the people who are coming from the casting and production end of this aren’t necessarily AFOLs. I think I mentioned at one point that I contributed to The Brothers Brick, but the person I was talking to sounded like they didn’t really know what that was. They do now! I do think seeing so many great builds from the community on The Brothers Brick day-in and day-out helped us while we were on the show.

But in terms of being cast, it certainly was showing our work at conventions and then posting it online for the world to see. One of our pieces called Treasure of the Snake Queen was featured on Beyond the Brick and really spread the build far and wide. That was definitely one of the things that they were interested in. We sent them the video of it and they really liked it. They also were on our Twitter page and checking out all of our different work, so having an online presence was important to being cast.

What has the reaction been from your friends and family? Has it opened their eyes to the hobby or have they been cheering you along all the way?

Flynn: Definitely cheering along all the way! I feel like they’re taking the hobby much more seriously. I’m not saying that anybody was ever negative about it, but I’m sure they were just like, “Wow, okay guys, whatever – this is your crazy art thing.” But I think everybody’s sort of signed on. One of the most remarkable things about it has been reconnecting with friends. I’ve had a lot of experiences in my life. I’ve worked a lot of different kinds of jobs and I’ve lived in a lot of places. My being on the show reconnected me with people. I was hearing from friends from high school, I was hearing from friends from when I lived in New Orleans, I was hearing from friends from my theater life, and from my LEGO life, and just all kinds of different places. And of course, our parents and families have been very supportive. So, I was really touched by how many people reached out to us and were excited about following along on our journey. And even now everybody has just been very positive–obviously they were sad to see us go—but we’re really happy with our work and proud of what we did and how far we went.

Richard: I don’t know how much we’ve inspired our relatives to build. We have one nephew on Flynn’s side who was big into building things in Minecraft for a long time and this sort of opened his eyes to the possibility of building directly in brick. So that’s pretty cool. Then on my side, our niece and nephew gave us their LEGO 9V train a couple of years back, and it was the central piece in a number of our MOCs. So we’ve connected with them over LEGO, even though they’re not really building right now. But I think it’s gotten them back into their own collections.

If you had one piece of advice for any future LEGO Masters contestants, what would it be?

Richard: Practice building on a clock. Have someone give you a challenge that you don’t expect and a time limit whether it’s three hours or an hour or however long. Just have someone present you with a challenge you don’t expect and do it in the time allotted. That’s the biggest thing. The clock was the biggest challenge.

Flynn: My biggest advice would be, first of all, be okay with improvising. And second of all, don’t be afraid to fail. But if you do fail, learn how to recover quickly.

Richard: I would agree with that because you just have to keep going. Anything that slows any of the teams down to hurts them at judging. So you just have to find a way to just pick up and keep going.

Did you watch earlier seasons of LEGO Masters to prepare for the show? And if so, how did that preparation affect the competition?

Richard: We had trouble watching the Australian show just because of access from the U.S. but we did get to watch several episodes. While I don’t know if it prepared us specifically for any one challenge, it did do two things. First, it highlighted that because this is for television, they would be focusing on large creations rather than detailed microscale models that don’t read very well on TV. So we knew already we were going to have to build big and have impressive silhouettes. Second, we were able to tell from the episodes we saw that there was a balance between creative and technical challenges. We pretty much expected there would be something like building a tower or a bridge or something where you had to be really structural. Then we knew there would be others where you had to be wildly imaginative.

Flynn: Once we saw that bridge challenge, we had a pretty good idea they might do that one. Definitely truss work was something we practiced before we actually went on the show. Being able to see some episodes as an overview and get a general idea ahead of time was really helpful. Of course, you hope that they’re going to do a particular challenge from Australia, but it’s not going to be the same and you are not going to have the same amount of time. Thinking about a challenge at home before you tape an episode is one thing. Thinking about it on the fly on the clock is a whole other thing. Thinking ahead about the general challenge types is better than preparing for a specific challenge you hope they repeat.

Richard: The production team that prepared the challenges was very clever. They were LEGO fans, so they knew how to make things hard. Both the UK and Australian versions of the show had bridge challenges, but ours had a few changes that made it much harder. In the Australian version, the contestants could build on the top of each side of the cliffs they were given. We had to keep it flush so a car could drive across the whole thing, so that meant that our bridges had to be built between the supports, not on top of them. We only had a small ledge—only four studs–to work with on either side of the cliffs to rest things on and have gravity be our friend. Even though this challenge looked similar, its actually a much, much harder challenge than Australia—and we even had less time!

Flynn: Another example is the movie genre challenge. Yes, you could prepare and think of all the movies you can bring to life using LEGO, but then our version wasn’t allowed to us any established IP (intellectual property). So we couldn’t do King Kong or Jaws, or anything like that. We had to make it up in our minds and then build it, so that was definitely very different from what we could have prepared for by watching other versions of the show.

It is inspiring to see a couple on TV supporting each other through difficult times. How do you two stay so positive?

Richard: On the show you see me reassuring Flynn a few times, but that is a two-way street. He and I have our ups and downs at different times, fortunately, and we’re there to pick each other up. We’re both very positive people, and we have a great time hanging out together. That’s how we are. We try hard things that we haven’t tried together before, and we have each other’s backs no matter what.

Flynn: We’ve known each other since the 90s, so we’ve been through a lot over the years, both difficult and exciting times. I think we’ve persevered because we have been able to remain positive throughout our relationship and through our lives in general. We both discovered that it doesn’t help us to stay stuck in a bad place mentally or emotionally. So we decided to stick in the good place.

Richard: We actually were together for a few years in the early 90s but we were young and broke up. We remained friends for the next 20 years living our own separate lives in different states. We did a lot of growing up in that interim before life brought us back together and we got married. Now, that is particular to our relationship so I don’t think I would recommend separating for 20 years to anyone else, but we had to trust in the future and in each other, having had quite some time to mature and reflect on our relationship.

You mentioned that the contestants feel like a big family now. What did you and the other teams like to do when the cameras stopped rolling?

Flynn: We would go to a lot of meals together! Obviously the whole pack of 20 of us didn’t go to every meal every time—we would break into smaller groups and do our own thing, but the big meals made us feel closer. There were lots of other fun times too. Friday night viewings of the Mandalorian in Boone’s room. A mini build challenge for Mark’s birthday. That was a blast. I got to be “Jamie” and Amie was “Amy” obviously. [laughs] There was also a Ruby’s down from our hotel, so our Friday night tradition became getting hamburgers and milkshakes together and eating them on the patio.

Richard: During the days when we had downtime when we weren’t actually building we would spend so much time trying to make each other laugh. It was great. It broke any leftover tension from the competitions and was just super fun.

How do you interact with your fellow castmates now?

Flynn: We see each other at conventions and stuff, but we also have our own private chat just for the contestants where we get together and can support each other. We’ve been doing live feeds while watching the show too, though the people on the east coast get it three hours before we do! Everyone is very supportive of each other and it is such a positive environment. Every convention we get to go to is like a mini family reunion. And we’ve also done some live streams where we get together and just build something. I really enjoy that and want to do more of it.

Richard: When we went to Bricks Cascade, Boone and his friend Perry from Portland were working on this collaborative build called Ewok Adventure Land that had another vertical rollercoaster. Boone asked us to collaborate with them, so we made a large rotating sign out of lots of Star Wars pieces that went on the very top. We had so much great collaboration. Mark helped out with building things. Sam came and had some ingenious tips with minifigures and the trees. It was just so natural to work together as a group and have so much skill and knowledge together in one place.

Flynn: The combination of all of us working together at Bricks Cascade was really wonderful because even though we were competitors, one of the things I left with was a desire to be able to work more collaboratively with people.

 

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Did you experience any kind of creative block or LEGO exhaustion after the show, and how did you possibly get over that feeling?

Flynn: Oh, yeah, absolutely. After the show, I wanted to be around LEGO, but I just didn’t want to build anything. Or at least I didn’t want to build anything without instructions. [laughs] I enjoyed putting some smaller sets together, but really, we did a lot of sorting. Richard came back to it a little sooner than I did. I found it very difficult to want to build anything just because the show was so incredibly creatively draining. What you don’t see at home is that we filmed these back to back–somebody got eliminated and the next day you are building again. There was no time for your brain to have any kind of creative rest because you were always moving on to the next thing. I had a really hard time with it. Actually, what brought me out of it was talking with some of the other contestants who were going through the same thing. And honestly, the biggest thing to get us out of the funk was Boone asking us to make the sign for the Ewok Adventure Land. It gave us purpose and a specific project to work on, and it really got me right back into it again.

Richard: It was also very creatively rewarding. We made seven big pieces in fewer than that in weeks. That’s an incredibly productive period for us. I had to take some recovery time after that–I did do some sorting. But more than that, I’ve been interested in building sets. After all of that creative output, coming up with solutions and design ideas and all that, I wanted to just follow some instructions. And so lately, and especially as people have been staying home more in the past few days, we’ve been doing some “Build & Chats” online. It’s been super fun to just put together a set and blab with people about LEGO. Now I can’t wait to start building our next big MOC. I’m inspired by the experience of the show to do better. I’m inspired by the bridge challenge to build things that are structurally stronger and want to build things with play functions for children. With that inspiration and as we’re getting used to having more time building at home, I think we’re going to be very productive.

There is a YouTube video of you and Boone singing “Parting Glass.” We’ve seen Boone singing on LEGO Masters but we never saw you singing. Why not? You have a great voice.

Flynn: I think it was one of those things where with Boone, we got him singing first and then that just sort of became Boone’s thing. I’ll tell you the story behind the video though. One night we were working on, I think it was during the Mega City Challenge. It had been an extremely long day. We were building and there weren’t cameras on us–we were still on the clock. To pass the time we just started singing, and everybody was singing at their different tables. Then I started singing “Parting Glass” and then Boone came in with his amazing harmonies. The whole room was really quiet with just us singing, it was so fun. After that, Boone was like, “Oh, we have to record that,” and I’m like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” We just kept putting it off. The recording that you see Boone and I singing actually happened the night of our elimination. We filmed the elimination, then everybody went back to the hotel and was doing their thing. We went out to dinner all together and then we went back to Boone’s room and recorded that.

Do you have any other thoughts about LEGO Masters you would like to share?

Richard: Flynn and I didn’t have any desire to be well known. We just love building LEGO and we like making art together. For anyone who’s considering being on LEGO Masters Season 2, from a hobbyist’s perspective it is a dream. It’s very hard, but I think it’s totally worth it. You build with almost unlimited bricks, and you’re surrounded by highly talented people from all over the country. There’s an entire cast and crew dedicated to making it possible for you to create cool things. So, I would say if you think you want to do it, do it! It was one of the greatest adventures of my life.

Where can we follow you and your LEGO creations online?

Flynn: We’ve got a bunch of places you can follow, starting with the main place we post on Instagram (trickybricks).  We also have a YouTube channel (TrickyBricks) and Twitter (@TrickyBricks) although we don’t use it a lot. And we have Flickr (Tricky Bricks). And we just started a Twitch channel (Tricky_Bricks). Oh, and we have a website at TrickyBricks.com.

Images courtesy of FOX, Richard and Flynn, and The Brothers Brick.

LEGO Masters airs in the US on Wednesdays after The Masked Singer on FOX. Stay tuned to The Brothers Brick for more interviews from the set, and check out these other LEGO Masters articles:

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