3 Million LEGO Bricks in One Room

(bouncy music)

When I was in elementary school, I would always talk

about how one day I wanted to be a Lego master

model builder.

And my parents were like that's cute, Robbie. You should

go to school and you should go to college and get

good grades and be a responsible adult, and here I am,

being a responsible adult, but still getting to fill

my childhood passion of playing with Lego bricks.

So we are here inside the model shop.

We have a collection of more than three million

Lego bricks.

We have some really rare colors here,

like plated gold, where Lego actually made gold bricks.

All in all, we have more than 70 colors to work with

here in the model shop.

You know, the ideas start in someone's imagination,

and they get it down however they can,

whether they use a computer or pencil and paper.

So, right now, I am working with the model shop

special proprietary computer drawing software.

It's just like any kind of CAD program that you

would use in an architecture firm or an art studio,

except ours is based on Lego bricks.

It allows us to build 3D with bricks, and

you can get way up close and you can see

on the inside where all the bricks would be.

You can also zoom out and get a great overview

of your model.

Here we have one of the guardian dragons from

Lego Ninjago World.

We installed one of these this morning, but this just

gives you a feel for what the model is going to look like.

So, when it comes time to build the Lego model,

using what we have done here on the computer,

we'll take this screen and it shows the model

in slices and it shows a slice for every Lego

layer of plate.

`Now, what we'll do is scroll up, one layer at a time,

`and every time we scroll up one layer, we'll build those

Lego bricks in those Lego plates.

The guardian dragon we installed this morning,

we estimate it has about 77,280 bricks.

You know, in the model shop, we work as a team,

so it would take one person nearly a month

to build that dragon.

We are all master model builders, but each of us

has strengths. We can all do everything, but

some of us do certain things better than others.

Robbie is really great at replicating buildings.

I am kind of the Greeble and SNOT guy, and

SNOT stands for studs-not-on-top.

We build studs sideways so whenever there is

a mosaic that's got some crazy lines and

stuff in it, they always give it to me.

Right now, we are re-doing the New York area.

I've built two subway stations.

So this station is modeled after one that has a

very intricate mosaic.

What they ended up doing was jumping every plate

half a step so you've got this really very tight

integrated mosaic that is not very commonly done.

There is a big sense of relief when you see kids,

and guests, and families enjoying everything that we

have worked so hard to build.

It's one thing, cause we want to inspire kids

when we are building our models, but it's another

to see it happen. To see a kid's eyes light up

when he gets to look at one of those dragons and say

I could totally build that at home,and he could.