We have now reached Sunday morning and the LEGO Fan Weekend is closing in on the final stint of the public exhibition.
This year we have 300+ AFOL participants from more than 20 countries between Hong Kong and Brazil.
It has been a blast so far and the public visitors and visiting employees from LEGO in Billund are all amazed at the high quality of MOCs and AFOL enthusiasm they are met with in the 2400 square metres of exhibition.
The event opened with a Keynote speech and welcome from Jørn Strange Lykke.
Last night at the Saturday Night Dinner, Jamie Berard paid us a visit and presented the new Maersk Ship with video and real model present and afterwards everybody got to look and touch.
During Saturday a Speedbuild competition was done with two teams of 6 persons competing in building the 10234 Sydney Opera House the fastest. The winning time was 1h11m06secs.
As a special treat Martyn Bogarts ran a combined speech and workshop on the new EV3 which was very interesting and a super chance for the AFOLs to do a Q&A on the new product and what it can do or can’t do.
Later Sunday there will be a speecj/presentation on “Big Bang Theories” covering how the designers and team behind Chima and Ninjago made it all happen.
Here’s a few images to give you an impression of the event.
More can be found in my flickr account (linked in the right side widget menu).
So during this weekend the LEGO Family Days are taking place in Billund. All LEGO employees are invited to bring their closest family to Billund to show them the factories and how everything is done.
A while back the organizers asked us in Community Support to find some Danish AFOLs to showcase what the AFOL community can build and also to represent the fans.
So with some help from the Danish LUG we managed to find 11 of their members who would willingly spend their weekend in Billund showing everyone what they can build and talking with LEGO employees and their families.
The AFOLs started to arrive in Billund around 12 o’clock on Friday and kept on pouring in and setting up until late in the evening. In the end they had set up an amazing layout and some neat dioramas and a GBC section that certainly represent and showcase the skills and creativity of the AFOL community in general.
Since everything was (and still is) set up in the middle of the factory, pictures are restricted – but with a few phonecalls we were allowed to do a few shots of the area as long as we pointed the cameras away from the production itself.
The AFOLs from Byggepladen were “live” from 9 until 1730 today and will be again tomorrow.
Then they’ll take everything apart and head back home in all directions.
It is truly amazing to just be there and witness the joy and enthusiasm that AFOLs have when they talk about their creations and hobby. I am confident that a lot of our fellow LEGO employees were quite amazed at what they saw on display today.
This weekend I was fortunate enough to have been invited to BeLUG’s 10th Anniversary.
And we were even lucky enough to fit in a trip in Jan’s overbooked calendar as well, so early Saturday morning we took of in the direction of Hamburg Aiport and a couple of hours later we landed in Brussels. Now, I’ve never been given the possibility of enjoying the Belgian highways and trust me, there is not much to enjoy for tourists like me. The poor GPS lady was all over the place giving out directions to go left and right like nothing else!
Apparently the Belgian road designers love junctions, intersections, overlapping, roundabouts and dual lanes turning into 6 lanes going in all directions. Nevertheless we did succeed (thanks to some awesome driving skills from Jan) to arrive at the hotel – check in – back to the car – new 15 kilometer road rage and then finally at the school in Merelbeke where the celebration took place.
They (BeLUG) had a pretty nice setup with several competitions, a Technic Workshop and a “walk down memory lane”-presentation on the last 10 years of BeLUg.
LEGO Games contestBuild a Rabbit contest from the Fierce Flyers Creator setMore rabbits!
When the workshop, presentation and contest were done, it was time for a wicked Quiz on everything LEGO and BeLUG. It started out slow but in the end the questions were pretty hard – and me not being able to understand the language was not an excuse – plenty of volunteer translators around!
One of the easier questions!30 questions later the counting to find the winner had begun. Do note that the smiling butterfly lady only look relaxed because she made the quiz. Good one!
After that we had a nice BBQ with some Belgian beer! Then the Super Tombola Winners were announced by random draw. All participants could buy a raffle ticket at 1 EUR and then have a go at winning everything from a Grand Emporium to polybags. There were plenty of prices and I do believe everyone liked it. A nice gesture from the LUG towards it’s members as the ticket income hardly covered more than 10% of the giveaways!
Then it was time for dessert which was really nice icecream servings with chocolate sauce and plenty of it as well. But not until I had the mic for a couple of minutes where I thanked the BeLUG members for their dedication and hard work in sharing their hobby and passion for the past ten years. We then presented them with a custom red 10th Anniversary trophy that we’ve built back in Billund – though I must admit that I had to glue some of it.
Saying “THANK YOU!”The trophy and happy chairman of BeLUG (Tom DeBruyker)
And then as a finale, they threw an auction with some really nice LEGO items and memorabilia.
Thank you BeLUG for inviting us, having us, being kind to us and Tom for buying us French Fries at the local fair!
Will we be back? Definetly, if not sooner then at the next BeLUG anniversary NO DOUBT!
So yesterday night we had a nice dinner and afterwards the LEGO Designer Maarten Simons gave a presentation around his work which was very much appreciated by the AFOLs present.
The evening ended with an auction.
Today I was walking around and discussed more with all the nice Italian AFOLs and took some more pictures.
Maarten and the itLUG LEGO Ambassador Luca Rusconi.
The extremely nice cars Luca has built.
A very nice SW diorama
Learning about MOCs 🙂
It was again a very nice event and it has evolved a lot in the 3 years since I last was in Ballabio.
Well done Marco and team and thanks a lot for the great time.
Today and tomorrow I am together with Maarten Simons visiting the small village of Ballabio in northern Italy to participate in the annual itLUG event.
It is a very nice location in the local primary school surrounded by a beautiful scenery.
There are over 100 participants mainly from Italy and it is very crowded with visitors.
There are plenty of cool MOCs so here some pictures.
I am especially impressed by this very detailed winter scenery build by Luigi
and those incredible MOCs by Riccardo!
Tonight we will have the AFOLs evening with good food and nice activities so stay tuned for tomorrows report.
My name is Keith Severson, and I am the newest member of the community support team in CEE. My role is senior manager, thus I am the manager of Kevin, Jan and Kim, and I am reporting to Tormod Askildsen. My job is to provide support and leadership for the community support team. Hopefully I can make their lives a bit easier, so they can provide even more support to the community!
I am an American citizen, but I am based out of the Billund office. I have been living in Denmark since 2007; my wife and I moved over here, not because of LEGO, but due to work at my previous company, which was in wind energy. I grew up in northern Minnesota, and I studied industrial technology/engineering at the University of North Dakota. We also have a 1.5-year old son, who is now very speedy around the house and speaks more Danish than me!
Family picture from Christmas 2012. Keith, Anna, Micah, Luna (Dog), Puss in boots (cat).
I worked in North Dakota and Denmark in the wind industry until 2011, at which time I moved into LEGO as a project manager in the R&D engineering area. There, I worked with both molding and decoration manufacturing across the LEGO factories. From June 2012 until May 2013, I worked in the trade marketing department of LEGO, implementing new store solutions. And now I am a part of a really amazing group of people who have a pretty awesome job!
Keith Severson in idaho on top of a 1.5 Megawatt wind turbine!
I am incredibly happy to be a part of this organization, and I am humbled by what Kevin, Jan, and Kim do everyday. I am truly inspired to see the amazing work and activity that fans do around the world! I can already tell this will be a lot of fun!
Today I visited the International Air Show at Paris Le Bourget for some meetings. I had great meetings and the show is a blast – lots of A
airplanes on the ground and flying!
Airbus A400 M (it looks bulky but can almost make a looping!)
Airbus A380 on the ground and flying (the silent giant)
Me in front of a GE turbine for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (yes, it is big)
Close to the planes
A model of the Kourou mission room at CNES exhibition built by AFOL Damien Labrousse (great MOC and a very nice guy)
In the evening some AFOLs and me visited the LEGO Store in Paris.
And we had a very nice dinner together (including a Czech AFOL who was around for Business in Paris)
Closing the day with a little roundtrip in Paris by night!
Thanks to FreeLUG and especial Daniela and Sylvain for being so nice hosts. It was a great trip!
Today I had a great day first day in Paris. I got guided around by Daniela Drost who is the LEGO Ambassador for FreeLUG.
First I did a short visit to a store selling LEGO products.
Nice LEGO Architecture shelf!
Afterwards we went for some sight seeing and had some great discussions while walking around.
This could certainly be an inspiration for a Modular house 🙂
Sacre Coeur – how beautiful is this!
And the view – breath taking!
In the evening I had a dinner meeting with 15 FreeLUG members including Philo (yes, the Mindstorms Expert), Erik Brickerik Amzallag (President of FreeLUG), Pascal Brugier (the AFOL who builds all Airbus planes in LEGO bricks) and other very nice AFOLs.
We had some great talks and discussions.
Tomorrow I will visit the Paris Air Show for some meetings and afterwards the LEGO Store and again dinner with some AFOLs. Stay tuned!
Today I visited the LEBGO exhibition in a mall called Serdika Center in Sofia, Bulgaria.
It is a very nice exhibition and it was great fun to meet with many Bulgarian AFOLs in the center, see the MOCs and go with some of the most active AFOLs for a good talk around TLG and a very nice dinner afterwards.
Here some exhibition pictures.
A breath taking Technic crane.
A nice castle/pirats layout – and yes it is LEGO MOCs in an aquarium.
I got a very nice gift – Architecture style MOC of the Sofia Cathedral.
He found Mr. Gold 🙂
Dinner and discussions at a traditional restaurant with live music and dancing.
Thanks to the very nice guys and girls from LEBGO LUG to host me and putting this great first mall exhibition in Bulgaria together. Very well done!
So today the Danish LUG Byggepladen celebrate it’s 10th Anniversary.
We are lucky enough to be invited to participate and sit-in on the speeches.
First of is some of the founding members taking us back to 2003 with pictures and funny comments.
Jan and Tormod is going to do a speech on the AFOL community and later we’ll have cake and tonight a fantastic celebration dinner.
What a nice cake!
Congratulations on the first 10 years – let’s do this again in another 10 years.
Community Team Blog 