Photo-A-Day #4537

Today was a day that I’ve been waiting for! Today was the day that the Star Wars Millennium Falcon was released in stores and this was the largest most expensive LEGO set ever. And I didn’t even have to buy it. No, I did not get it for free. My friend and co-host of Built from Bricks, Brian bought it because this was something that his son CJ had always wanted and he is building it as a tribute to his son. He let me build a little, too.

This was a very hard set to get because only so many of them would be released in stores. Brian was up at 4am to get over to the Providence Place Mall to be first in line to pick up the set. His plans were to Livestream the build all day and there was no way that he was going to miss getting this set. Luckily he got there first and was able to secure the very first one sold at the store that day.

This is a Massive Box. It was so massive that a handle was added to it as well as wheels so that people could carry it out of the store.

Now, Brian was at the store for many hours waiting to get the first set. I showed up with 15 minutes to go before the doors opened to capture the purchase on Facebook Live. You casn see that and our other livestream videos below.

I even took a photo of Brian and the store manager Michael, who popped into our livestream during his lunch break.

Brian then took his newly acquired LEGO set home and I headed to his house as well because we were going to LIVEstream our entire build. Well, at least whatever we could get done in the next 8+ hours. Yeas we livestreamed for 8 1/2 hours. You can see the streams below because we had quite the setup going. We had Brian’s phone on a tripod to livestream on Facebook Live and then we had his laptop and my webcam working together to get a straight on shot and an overhead view of the build for the YouTube livestream. It was complex but it was one of our best coordinated shoots yet. We had three tables set up. Two held the important things like the laptop, snacks and my social media command center including my laptop so that I could monitor and moderate both of the livestreams. This only became a problem when I went to the other side of the camera and helped build or sort pieces. We missed some people, important people in the livestream, like Brian’s wife. Oh and we had another couple of cameras going as well. I used my Samsung Gear 360 to take a timeplapse of the build. That came out to be a little over 5 minutes long where it took a photo ever 10 seconds. Can I say how happy I am that Brian has a giant powerstrip that can take about 10 items at once. This made it easy to power all the devices. But, even with that I still had both my phones on power packs. One phone running a hotspot for my laptop and other phone (so I would not interfere with the signal for the livestream) and the other phone connected to the Gear 360. I know that is a lot of technical stuff that you probably don’t care about but I want to know for my own sake down the road. I also used my Samsung NX1 to take still shots along the way, like this one of our behind the scenes setup.

We set up the livestream and the space for about and hour and then at noon we started streaming on YouTube. It wasn’t until about an hour later that we started on Facebook. You can see both of the Facebook streams and the Youtube stream below. Please take a look and like the videos. I think that we were doing a phenomenal job and we just aren’t getting enough people watching what we do. We interact with everyone who comes into the chat room, sorry Michelle. We also keep improving the show quality and I’m really happy to be a part of this build and moreover, this show.

Facebook Live Part 1

Facebook Live Part 2

YouTube Livestream

So, I don’t expect you to watch the full 8 hours, so to save you the suspense I’ll tell you how far we got. We ended up building bags 1-4. Now that may not seem like a lot but there are 17 bags in the 7500+ brick build. I actually brought in my LEGO Star Wars Set #7190 from 2000 that had 692 pieces. That was the first Millenium Falcon that LEGO produced. I may have to build that in the last hour of our final build of the huge Millennium Falcon build. I can build that one in an hour, no problem.