Yesterday, July 11, was the first-ever online edition of the Bricks by the Bay LEGO convention. I set up a MOC (“My Own Creation”) exhibit in my dining room, since we couldn’t meet up in person this year.
Normally we would have been gathering at the Santa Clara Convention Center to display our models and share our talents over the course of a weekend, but the Covid-19 pandemic has put a halt to such things, so they (like many other North American LEGO events) quickly organized a virtual convention, held on Zoom yesterday. It was a very successful event, and it was great to see so many familiar faces and a few new ones. The online event format is a great way to “travel” to events that you might not otherwise be able to go to, and I hope that some aspect of it continues even once we are able to return to meeting in person after the pandemic.
I hosted two events this year: a tour of my MOCs (see below) and a session of the 101 Bricks game, which I think was the first time this game had ever been played online instead of in person. Congrats to the winner, Colby B.!
As for the MOCs, as you can see in the above photo I basically took over my dining room with LEGO. I already had a number of LEGO sets on display, but I set up several tables with my MOCs as well. The main dining table featured my Micropolis models, while a table to one side had my art / sculpture / mosaic creations. I also had a small table with my Smoke Jumper airplane, and I had my House Concert model and a couple of other small models on the built-in sideboard. I took photos of the models and uploaded them to a Flickr album.
I didn’t record the MOC tour session, but I shot two videos today to try to recreate it as best as I could. Here is a video I made of the Micropolis display:
And here is one for the rest of the models:
I hope you enjoy those videos; it’s a new way for me to document my MOCs. Let me know if you’d like me to post more videos, instead of just photos, as I create new things.
Hopefully we will be able to get together in person next year on June 17-20, 2021, but for now, everyone please stay safe and healthy! Wash your hands, wear a mask, stay home if you can, etc.
Thanks for your virtual tour, Bill. I’ve seen photos of a few of these before but didn’t always know they were yours. Love the new rainbow apartments, and it was interesting to learn about the arches for wiring – although I’ve now got about 80 full blocks of Micropolis, so I probably won’t rush to adapt all of mine! ;-)