Designer Turns To Film Fans To Help Make Lego Jaws Set A Reality
If like us, you were a kid growing up in the 80s, the two words that guaranteed to make your head to explode with excitement were JAWS and LEGO. Alas, this life changing combination of a Lego Jaws set never came to pass…. until now.
One Jaws fan is pursuing the dream of a LEGO JAWS set for us all and needs our help to make it happen. We caught up with Jaws fan and LEGO builder/designer Paul Lavallee to learn more.
Paul: I'll start by saying that I am 35 and hadn't seen Jaws from start to finish until I was in my 30s... I've seen bits and pieces of it on TV, online and I would sometimes catch the end of it when I walked into a room when I was in college but I had never seen the whole thing until the last few years... I met my girlfriend 3 years ago and she was a huge movie buff and suggested we watch some of "the Classics" as she likes to call them and her number one favorite is Jaws. I have to agree with her now having watched it a few times over!
I love the 3 main characters but I think I identify with Hooper the most. I'm a little bit of a science and nature geek as well. I run an outdoors oriented social media account and to be honest I love sharks as a species so it seems to go against that idea to love a movie about the "Evil Shark" but I love movies for what they are; an experience and a fun time to distract from the real world and bring you into a story that you can relive over and over. Jaws is exactly that: a great story, a suspenseful score and a great cinematic experience!
Paul’s Jawsome LEGO design needs your help be a reality
My girlfriend and I are friends with the owner of a local Lego themed store called "The Brick Shack" in Grimsby Ontario and they got to talking about their favorite movie being Jaws and how Lego doesn't have a Jaws themed set on the market. We looked online for Jaws Lego set designs but none were detailed enough or big enough to satisfy us so I offered to design one myself. I went to college for 3d Animation and I had been building and designing Lego since I was a kid.
I started gathering reference images from the set of Jaws, details on the dimensions and manufacturer of the original Orca and the Orca 2, dimensions of the shark based on movie quotes and set design models and I found some very detailed wood and plastic model replicas that I used for color and detailed photo references. I still have a folder in my web browser full of links to them! Then I got to work on the design. Unlike building Lego from instructions, building from scratch is tricky because you need to envision the final look but start building from the hidden inner parts and work your way out to a finished product.
As I was working on it, we discovered Lego Ideas and that you could submit your creation for the chance to have Lego make it a real set! After working on the design for months and only sharing it with a select few friends for feedback, I felt it was ready to submit so I loaded the Lego Ideas page, logged in and clicked the submit Idea button and the first thing they ask: "Is your idea based on an Intellectual Property?" Well of course it is, I typed "Jaws" and it immediately came back with: "We've already evaluated this IP and have determined that we can't allow submissions based on it."
I was crushed, all that work, all that time and I would never see a real Lego Set made from this.
From there, we decided that we would at least build our own model of the set I worked so hard on designing so we began ordering parts from Lego.com and BrickLink.com and gathered them up. I currently need 3 more pieces to make it 100% complete. During the week leading up to the submission, I noticed Lego Ideas had a vote going for a new Lego BrickHeads for their 150th BrickHeads design. For those that don't know BrickHeads are kind of like a Funko Pop vinyl figure but built from Lego. One of the 4 options they gave for people to vote on was a Jaws character (Go vote for that too if you haven't already!)
This got me thinking, what if they decided to open up Jaws as an IP for Lego... I got a message from one of the friends I had shared progress pictures to and he said he saw a jaws set on Lego Ideas and was wondering if I had changed my design! I searched for Jaws on the Lego Ideas page and sure enough, there was already someone who had posted a Jaws themed set that was smaller and with a standard Lego shark figure.
I jumped on my computer and right away started updating the pictures and the writeup that I had worked on at least a month before to get it updated and submitted the Idea that night.
That is what brings me here to The Daily Jaws, I think that at least some of the fans of Jaws must also be fans of Lego or at least a good Jaws themed product and I want to ask for help in getting my design to 10,000 votes so we can see this thing really come to life with an Official Lego Set.
It's my birthday this weekend so we are building our own Jaws set with the pieces that we ordered, so if anyone is in the Grimsby, Ontario, Canada area, we are building it at "The Brick Shack" and displaying it there during the voting for Lego Ideas!
Let’s make this dream a reality - vote for Paul’s Lego Jaws set design here
Paul was interviewed by Ross Williams for The Daily jaws.
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