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, “Movie Genres” (2/26/2020), Christian and I created “Heartbreak of the Dragon Prince,” a fantasy romance with a thrilling conclusion!
In our final build, the Dragon Prince and his princess are threatened by a pair of nefarious necromancer brothers, who have summoned an army of skeletons to attack the castle. In the blockbuster moment we captured, the Dragon Prince—chained by wicked magic—has managed to delay the horde of skeletons with fire, but cannot prevent one of the necromancers from pushing his love from the top of the tower. Will he be able to save her from a deadly drop?
Read on for my special dissection of this 13-hour model’s process, design choices, and more.
Two Genres Becomes Three
After receiving critique from the Brickmasters during the previous week about our model’s smallish size, Christian and I came into this challenge determined to build something large. Based on what happened next, though, that goal turned out to be more complicated than we’d anticipated.
The initial prompt for this week’s challenge was to create a blockbuster scene that fell within one of eight classic movie genres: Comedy, Western, Kids, Thriller, Fantasy, Mystery, Monster, or Romance. By luck of the draw, Christian and I picked Romance. Given our desire to build big, Romance—a genre typically defined by small, intimate scenes—was one of the trickiest to turn into an epic-scale creation.
The solution we settled on was to create a fairy tale Romance, something Disney-style, with bold visuals and large landmarks. By adding aspects of Fantasy to our movie, we felt we could tell a clear love story while also fulfilling our desire for grandeur. So, we conceived of a scene in which a prince has been turned into a dragon, and has fallen in love with an adventurous princess. The first iteration of our model featured the titular Dragon Prince offering an enormous bouquet to his lady love, and both characters sporting cartoon hearts hovering over their heads. It was cute, concise, and effective.
Then—as I guess was inevitable in any good movie!—we faced a twist. After our initial eight hours’ build time, we and the other teams were told that we’d have to integrate a second classic movie genre into our creations. For our twist genre, Christian and I received Thriller. This is where our difficulties really began. After all, before we knew about the twist, we’d already essentially mashed up Romance and Fantasy. Now, on top of those two genres, we had to add a third!
Results were mixed; while Christian and I succeeded in implementing some aspects of Thriller in our build, but failed to nail the essence of the genre in our final piece.
Color, Motifs, and Design Choices
We’d designed our first scene on a 48x48 base, half the size of our finished build. We assembled the other half, which contained the necromancer’s cave and a smaller, ruined tower, during the five hours allotted to us for the challenge’s twist.
Our initial model consisted of two high-contrast elements: a tall, pale fairy tale tower and a large, dark dragon. We chose tan for the castle and black for the dragon to establish the dichotomy between them, but also out of convenience. Numerous walls, windows, profile bricks and slopes were all available in tan, while spikes, joints, curved slopes and flex tubing all came in black.
Likewise, secondary colors emerged based on the availability of certain elements. We included white on the castle because of the perfectly on-theme pre-printed panels which we found (which come originally from LEGO’s Disney Castle set). I made the dragon’s underside blue based on the colors available of “boat studs,” rounded and curved inverted pieces great for creature bellies.
I really love the lavender accents and ivy growing on the castle walls. Christian added these out of a desire to make the tower feel softer, and also to mitigate the presence of so many earthy colors in our model. We implemented lots of green, brown, and grey in our naturalistic terrain. Christian, who is an expert of scenery, designed all our trees. While we maybe could have built these with pink foliage instead of green during the purely Romance portion of the challenge, I don’t think that would have helped with the Thriller atmosphere we were trying to hit at challenge’s end.
I’m proud of the details we accomplished on the castle towers, including latticed stain glass windows, triangular roofs, flying buttresses, and inset spires. The nuances of these structures didn’t get a lot of screen time during the episode, but I think their overall impression still translates well.
The Dragon Prince
As soon as Christian and I decided to create a fairy tale, I knew I wanted to make an epic dragon! I love building dragons; unsurprisingly, designing this one was a delight for me. As a frequent designer of creatures, I felt quite in my element here, and ended up with a creature of which I was—and still am—very proud. I like the organic shape I managed here, even with a restrictive gear-driven function in the neck and a motor concealed in the body.
Generally, speaking, this dragon pulls from my bank of knowledge about creature building. The placement and structure of the joints, the positioning of the limbs, and the repeating patterns in the scaly armor are all derived from plentiful experience. Some more unusual details I’m especially satisfied with here are the bats wings for ears, the crest of spines on the sides of the head, and the curving, segmented underbelly on the neck.
I think my favorite part of this particular dragon, though, is his wings. Huge, articulated, and hollow, these appendages suggest the size and shape of enormous wings perfectly, without demanding that they’re solid. It would have been outrageously difficult to fill the complex polygons between the subtly curving spars of the wing, especially given the time constraint we were under, so I’m glad that my pragmatic choice to leave the wings “empty” still left them looking great.
From Evil Obstacle to Heartbroken Hero
Our dragon only became the Dragon Prince towards the end of the challenge’s initial portion. When we conceived of the dragon, we imagined him as a villain or a monster, playing into the classic fairy tale tropes of a dragon guarding a hapless person in distress. Certainly, I built the bulk of the dragon while under the impression that it would be a villainous beast; in infrastructural ways, I think a lot of the design of the creature still belongs more to a wicked character than a good one. The animal’s dark color scheme is the biggest factor working against us, here.
However, since Christian and I realized midway through our process that the dragon could be much more compelling as a protagonist than as a villain, I did what I could to make the dragon sympathetic. Fixes I executed included changing the dragon’s eye color from an evil red to a friendly blue, giving him an oversize crown atop his head, and placing that wonderful—and outrageous!—heart over his head.
With the twist, when the Dragon Prince’s situation became far direr, we “broke” the heart and gave him some enormous tears in his eyes. I feel for the Prince… poor guy! Those tears especially make his open-mouthed expression look shocked and scared.
Skeleton Minions
In our attempt to implement the Thriller genre—while still keeping things family-friendly—Christian and I thought to build these skeletons. Fear and conflict are big parts of Thriller, so we knew we had to bring some evil into our piece… And nothing says “bad guys” like skeleton minions! We devised a cave with a skull-emblazoned door as the place from which this skeletal horde emerged. We reasoned that a dark, spooky place is also very Thriller.
However, we didn’t succeed at bringing the Thriller atmosphere pervasively to our build. Any dark intrigue our little cave added to the scene was confined within its rocky walls, and then dwarfed and outmatched by our bright and elegant castle. Certainly, the little pocket of Thriller we’d included with the cave didn’t convince the Brickmasters that we were building enough within the genre. Overall, I don’t think we implemented the hallmarks of Thriller on a broad enough scale.
Still, Christian and I had fun mass-producing these little skeletons, arming them with myriad helmets, breastplates, and tools, and arranging them towards their battle.
Dragon’s Desolation
The skeleton army has arrived at the castle ready to take it over. They’ve come prepared, ready to knock down the tower with a catapult! But this, very quickly, gets torched by the Dragon Prince.
I had fun designing this piece of siege equipment in an already-charred state. It was cool to build brown to black gradients all over the model, to demonstrate how the little launcher was burned. Beyond the catapult, one of the castle’s neighboring trees has also been set ablaze by dragon fire. To reinforce the impression that the Dragon Prince’s fire had cut a swath of clear destruction along the ground, Christian and I reconfigured a portion of our original build’s grassy terrain to look deadened.
At the Gates
One aspect of our model that didn’t get highlighted in its LEGO Masters episode was the castle’s electrically-powered raising and lowering portcullis. The defensive grate could slide up into the castle, revealing behind it the King and the Queen being ambushed by some skeletons in a sneak-attack. This element of surprise—another choice designed to evoke the Thriller genre—turned out to be too little, too late. Alas!
The Falling Princess
Our original heroine, the adventurer princess, is in dire straits when we happen upon her in “Heartbreak of the Dragon Prince.” While attempting to defend her home, the princess has been pushed off the edge of the tower, towards burning wreckage several stories below. The prognosis seems bleak, which is intentional: Christian and I wanted to make explicit an element of suspense in our final presentation. And, while the moment we froze was thrilling, it still wasn’t thriller.
At the end of the day, putting Thriller on top of Fantasy and Romance proved unfeasible for us. Although we did manage to add some thrilling elements like darkness, evil, and suspense to our build, we failed to capture the true essence of the Thriller genre. Ultimately, while we were proud of our finished model’s detail, functionality, and scale, we also recognized that it didn’t fulfill the “Thriller” portion of our prompt. As such, Christian and I decided to use our Golden Brick on this challenge, thereby securing us immunity from judgment for the week.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions or comments about this model, feel free to leave them in the comments below.