In the winter of 2020, my friend Christian Cowgill and I appeared in the first American season of LEGO Masters, a reality-style building competition show. For Episode 3 of the series, “Cut in Half” (2/19/2020), Christian and I created “Beneath the Surface,” a epic underwater vignette built on the side of a halved antique diving helmet.
Read on for my special dissection of this 12-hour model’s process, design choices, and more!
Prompt and Premise
For this challenge, we and our fellow contestants were asked to build something imaginative as the “other half” of an object that’d been sliced in two. During the first-come-first-serve rush for items, Christian and I were quick, and we were lucky… we couldn’t have asked for a more provocative, fantastical, or epic object than the diving helmet we managed to snag!
Together, we assembled something unlike anything either of us had ever made, but which nevertheless played to our strengths. I leaned into my specialties, creature-making and automatic movement; Christian, meanwhile, flexed his skills as a landscaper and texture artist. To me, “Beneath the Surface,” represents one of the purest synergies of our brick-building fortes that we managed to achieve on LEGO Masters.
Our premise grew pretty organically—effortlessly, really—out of the diving helmet. Of all the ordinary objects available, ours was probably the least “ordinary”: it felt, after all, most at home at the depths of the ocean in a bygone century! The helmet also presented a pretty large buildable surface area compared to some of the other options, which we saw as an advantage.
In our first brainstorm, we weighed Christian’s idea of doing something ancient Greek. However, when I sketched a giant squid wrapped around the helmet, whose mantle masqueraded as an island, we agreed the story and silhouette would be too striking to pass up. The Grecian angle, luckily, returned to us midway through the build: we realized we could grow our story by including a sunken Greco-Roman city on the seafloor. I’m glad we managed to follow my partner’s initial instincts; otherwise, that sandy bottom might have remained barren but for coral and fishes!
Color, Motifs, and Design Choices
Christian and I created a rather complex chromatic language in “Beneath the Surface.” Red, blue, green, purple, yellow, white, black, brown, tan, grey… we had a lot of colors in play! However, I think due to our deliberate color blocking, motif repetition, and color/substance delineation, the build avoids looking too cluttered. Here’s what I mean by each of those:
Color blocking: the model’s most prominent objects—the water (built in blues), the Kraken (built in reds), and the city (built in white)—lean on monochromatic schemes to differentiate them from other elements of the build and serve as landmarks for the eye.
Motif repetition: brightly-colored aspects of the model, like the fishes and the coral, don’t appear just once, but several times each, meaning that even while there are numerous vibrant colors present, they feel integrated across the design.
Color/substance delineation: we did our best not to repeat a color across more than one “substance,” i.e., grey is always rock, tan is sand, red is the Kraken’s body, green is vegetation.
We chose dark red for the Kraken since it was a color we hadn’t employed before… plus, it felt suitably cephalopod-ish. I love this color, but compared to plain red, it’s relatively rare. Many standard and specialized pieces weren’t available in the Brick Pit in dark red. Consequently, I got to face the enjoyable challenge of building—problem-solving, really—using a limited palate.
Two “nice parts usages” of which I’m especially proud on this model are our employments of the yellow banana and white croissant minifigure accessories. These two bricks were given to us, of all people, by our host Will Arnett! During one of Christian and my frequent forays to the Brick Pit, we ran into him, and for a comedic bit he passed off a couple of random accessories to us, joking we’d better use them or risk hurting his feelings. Well, we used them, all right! The bananas became leaves of a yellow coral plant, while the croissant turned into the decorative pediment above a temple.
Above the Surface
One of our goals for “Beneath the Surface” was to create a convincing illusion on top of the Kraken’s head. In other words, we wanted the “island” that this woefully misinformed ship was approaching to really look the part. It took some serious sculpting, and trial and error, to build a landmass which looked decent in microscale, at an angle, with our 1-brick-thick waterline running along its base. I’m proud of how well we did with this little obstacle.
Christian was responsible for creating the water itself, so all the ripples and waves along the ocean’s surface are his work. He did an awesome job giving the water—which could have looked terribly flat—texture and a sense of depth. We’d originally envisioned building the water with transparent blue pieces, but found we could neither achieve the stability nor the texture we wanted using these. Because the water was all blue, we made the “sky” behind the boat (built onto what little part of the helmet rose above our waterline) in the dusky colors of sunset.
We included a teeny tentacle tip protruding just in front of the ship, both to show the Kraken’s dynamism and to help reinforce the true size disparity between the exploration ship and the monster beneath it. Speaking of the ship, this was a micro-build I tackled, and was nicely proud of. I like how I achieved the rounded sides of the boat, and how I made its sails.
Enveloping the Helmet
Christian took point on wrapping our diving helmet in seaweed and algae. Other teams faced some scrutiny for masking their halved objects too much, but I think Christian and I got away with it because our object was so shiny! I relish the sense of ancientness the plant life gives our already aged object. Those gold leaves Christian included are to demonstrate oxidation, where wet greenery met with rusting metal. I also find that they give the seaweed the appearance of more volume.
The other aspect of the build trespassing into the helmet’s territory are two hugely long tentacles from the Kraken. I wish I had built these thicker, since they currently get a little lost against all the vegetation; however, rest assured, these whip-like tentacles are wrapping the helmet in artsy, elegant ways even if you can’t see them!
The Lost City
Christian and I collaborated most closely during our build on crafting the Atlantean ruins on the seafloor. Once we had the idea to include it, we decided it would be in our best interests to drop everything, give ourselves 30-45 minutes to both work exclusively on micro-scale temples, columns, and structures, and then return to business as usual. This provided us with a break from our other focuses, allowing us to both knock out the city easily and to return to the rest of “Beneath the Surface” refreshed.
I already mentioned the croissant usage up above. Some of my other favorite element usages came from Christian, who thought to use a white lamppost as a victory column in the city square, and some feathered minifigure wings to crenelate the largest temple. I quite like how the city turned out, and I think it helps to reinforce our scale—and the Kraken’s legendary hugeness—by representing micro down at the base of the model, just as the ship does up at the top.
Functionality
“Beneath the Surface” featured four electrical functions run by three motors, two battery boxes, and two light bricks, all disguised either within the seafloor or within the Kraken itself. I’ll describe these below.
The bobbing ship. An axle, pushed up and down through the surface of the water by a rotating cam, gave this ship—which sat on a hinge—a “bobbing” pattern. The ship’s motor was actually masked on the ocean floor, with a long axle running up the side of the helmet to power the cam closer to the waterline.
The glowing eyes. These were two light bricks built onto the sides of the Kraken’s head, each covered up by trans-red and trans-orange plates and further enveloped by clear “eyeball” domes. I designed these eyes to be easily removable, so Christian and I could leave them out for most of the build without draining all their battery.
The moving tentacles. These run from two worm gears, which are themselves geared in sequence and run by one motor and one battery box concealed within the Kraken’s body and accessible by hinging open the top of the island. Only the side tentacles move, but I think they do a ton to help the Kraken feel alive! Unlike the other moving functions, these are also voluntarily controlled, rather than looping.
The swimming fish. Geared together with a long train of in-line spur gears hidden just under the level of Atlantis, these fish swim intentionally in different directions and at different speeds. I didn’t want them to look too uniform with each other, even though they use the same motor. This motor, and the one which powers the ship, are wired to a battery box concealed in the corner of the base.
Balancing the Illusion
We opted to build “our half” to be roughly the same size as the diving helmet. If I have one regret about “Beneath the Surface,” it’s that Christian and I didn’t pursue as aggressive a scale as we could’ve done. We did manage to achieve an awesome level of detail across all aspects of the build, but that was largely because we set ourselves a smaller canvas than some of the other teams.
Still, the scale we chose ended up being about as big as we could have managed, given the position and weight of the Kraken. Because we had to build horizontally, rather than vertically, there was only one real option for mounting it: relying on sheer clutch power. A Technic structure running through the squid culminates in an angle where it meets the helmet, and this is in turn slotted into long studded beams running down into the hill of the seafloor. It wasn’t the strongest support, and sometimes the weight of the Kraken’s mantle would lever itself out of position.
I think the water actually did a lot to help hold up the Kraken. The way we designed things, this thin sheet of bricks wrapped the Kraken at its furthest, heaviest point, offering extra support to the biggest balance liability we had to deal with. It was a real—albeit accidental—boon to holding the build together.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions or comments about this model, feel free to leave them in the comments below.