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This is the first of a series of posts I plan on posting about our experiences
at Mindfest.
This posts covers what we learned about presenting models in a public setting.
If anyone has anything to add to this please post a followup to this message.
There were many things that went real well for us but there were some things
that did not go so well. I will tackle the problems we had first.
1. This first issue was somewhat unavoidable on our part but it was still an
issue. It seemed to me that there was very little time allocated to us for
setup. This caused problems in that we had hundreds of people all swarming
around us as we tried to setup our display. This was especially hard with the
AT-AT's which require a lot of setup time and adjustments to get them to
balance and not come crashing down.
2. The first day/night (Friday) I wanted to try and have no "Warning" or "Do
Not" signs and allow people to be a little hands on. In retrospect this was a
bad idea. While most people were very courteous and respectful of our display
there were some that needed to be held in check. In particular there were 2 or
3 children present at our table all evening while we were trying to set up. I
think that they probably handled every minifig we had (about 150 of them)
during the evening and were rearranging them as well (for example if I had a
female head on a soldier or pilot it was immediately replaced with a male head
especially if I was using a hair piece instead of a helmet). Also because we
were often distracted and overwhelmed at different times we did not catch
everything that was going on. At one point an X-Wing and a modified AirSpeeder
walked off and were whooshing around the exhibit hall. That was the string
that broke the monkey's back so to speak and signs went up the next morning.
3. It seemed to me that many people did not really respect our models because
they thought they were either a TLG display or that we were somehow funded by
TLG because who really has that much LEGO... This was also corrected with
"100% personal collections" signs that got some strange looks of disbelief but
were somewhat effective.
4. It also seemed that no matter how many signs we put up it did not
completely work and much knuckle slapping had to be done. This was not just
kids either this was often just as big a problem with Adults as with Kids. One
example is that often someone would ask "Do you mind if I look at that" and
before the words got out of their mouths a model was in there hands. Other
examples were people just touching and even grabbing at things. It seemed
people liked to grab at the zip line on Shaun's AT-AT and start pulling or
swinging it. One guy even grabbed the head of Shaun's AT-AT and started
swinging it around (I lost it there).
5. Don't plant your LEGO trees close to the front edge of you table. I had to
rebuild my Tree probably 5-7 times.
This all being said there were many more positives than negatives and we all
had a lot of fun and would do it again in a heartbeat. Some of the positives
are listed below.
1. We had a high traffic, high visibility table and it gave us a lot of
visitors. Including TLG reps and fans alike.
2. We got to meet a lot of very interesting people.
3. We got to share our models with the public plus we probably had one of the
largest private Star Wars displays ever shown in public. (I just can't imagine
a bigger display of private Star Wars models in one place).
4. We got to spread to word that there are Adult LEGO hobbyists out there and
that we are serious about what we are doing. For example I was talking with
one LEGO rep and he asked me how many members we had and when I told him 32 his
eyes almost came out of his head and then I told him our group had only been in
existence for 3 months I had to get him a cold towel (well not exactly but I
thought I was going to have to get one with the look on his face :).
5. Because of the nature of this event everyone wanted to know what our stuff
(especially the AT-AT's) did. This was good because we could give our spiel
about how we don't all do robotics. Thanks to Henry Chea and his car we did at
least have one RCX brick on the table plus we had Larry's train that at least
moved. Occasionally as soon as we said the AT-AT's were just models people
would walk away or go right to one of the other models that did something at
our table. Most of the time however people were very interested in hearing
about our group and our different interests.
I know that my negatives seem bigger than the positives but that is just
because it is easier to write about negatives because they stick in your mind.
I think many of our problems could have been avoided if we had just had some
signs at the beginning and then had a no exceptions policy.
All in all this was a wonderful event and although we experienced some growing
pains nothing was destroyed and amazingly both AT-AT's remained standing
throughout the event. So good experiences for all and I hope that this can be
of help for some of you that may plan public displays in the future.
Eric Kingsley
Remove ".nospam" when replying by E-mail
The New England LEGO Users Group
http://www.nelug.org/
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