Monster Costume Party

Monster Costume Party - LEGO MOC

A bar where everybody knows your (monster) name.

This month's LUG building challenge was to make something related to either (or both) "alien" or "camping." Right away I knew what I was going to do—the question was how to fit the specifics of my idea into the limitation of an 8x8 cube.

Ever since I got the Alien Tourist minifigure in CMF 26, I knew I wanted to put him in different locations (in much the same vein as Star Trek LARPers going to Renaissance Faires); then I got the Werewolf Spider-Man from the Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse CMF and an idea began to crystallize. Then I found a sailor with a blue-jeans-patterned mermaid tail (apparently from the 2023 Quarter 4 Build-A-Minifigure offering) and I had it: a monster party.

Or rather, a costume party where the party-goers were themselves monsters.

So you have a werewolf dressing up as Spider-Man, an alien costumed as a tourist, and a merman putting on a vintage sailor's uniform.

Given the camera that came with the alien, I figured it would make sense to have him be taking a picture of the other contestants' costumes, and as I was sorting through my minifig accessories, I found this clear cup with dark orange contents and decided that it would make for a convincing Long Island iced tea for the sailor. I then started going through my printed tiles to see what might be useful, and found a 2x6 tile with "Cyber Beast" printed on it: the perfect name for a werewolf DJ! There were also several Vidiyo BeatBit tiles and a beastly furrowed brow (from the Chima Gorilla Legend Beast set), wood plank tiles, and several other types of beverage utensil.

With the first batch of raw materials collected, I faced my first challenge: a minifigure-scale disco ball.

The soccer ball / GBC ball is way too big and hard to attach to anything, and the various Technic balls are too small; more to the point, none of them would really obviously scream "I'm a disco ball" if I were to hang them from a LEGO room's ceiling. Then I remembered that the DOTS line actually had a disco ball tile (from the Extra Dots Series 8 - Glitter and Shine pack). I had three of these so combining them with a 1x1 brick with studs on four sides (plus a blank black 1x1 tile for the back side) resulted in an ok approximation of a disco ball. I also tried using the magenta wavy hose piece from various DREAMZzz sets as a streamer in the background:

If I was going to have the werewolf be a DJ, he'd need a table of some kind. an 8x8 cube is very small, and that necessitates shorthanding things, reducing them down to a bare minimum while still retaining visual clarity. My first attempt used a 2x3 rocker plate as the base for a VIDIYO record (standing in for an entire turntable) and a vintage control panel. This was, however, less than ideal: the rocker plate tilted in the wrong direction (side to side instead of toward the DJ), and I only had it in dark red and reddish brown:

I went back to my SNOT box to see what I could work up in more matching colors. The result not only had a smaller footprint than the first attempt, but also had some extra details. The keyboard (inverted so it looks less like a computer keyboard and more like a soundboard) is from CMF Series 25's E-Sports Gamer, the dark turquoise headphones are from a Monkie Kid set, and the battery indicator is from one of the City Space sets:

But the real test will be how everything looks when it's put together between two walls and a floor. As shown in the disco ball picture above, I wanted one wall to use a 1x6x5 panel with corrugated profile (the "shipping container wall" piece, which I got a lot of from a recent Pick-A-Brick wall visit, and wanted to start getting familiar with). The other wall would need to be a combination of regular 1-wide bricks and masonry profile bricks, with an assortment of SNOT bricks to hold the decorative panels. I had the largest selection of all of these in dark orange (I had to sub in a few nougat SNOT and 2/3 bricks, but those would be covered by tiles so the color mismatch wouldn't matter). I also carried the dark orange bricks along the bottom of the shipping container wall to give a visual foundation and tie the two walls together. A mix of SNOT bricks and brackets also had the side effect of putting different tiles at different heights (half a plate's difference), giving the final wall a more organic feel:

And now to put all the elements together for a test run:

I've found that using jumper plates is a good way to give things a more natural angle, especially minifigures, so you can see here that each one is standing on a 1x2 or 2x2 jumper plate. The result is decidedly...ok. I can tell I'm going in the right direction, but some tweaks are needed. The disco ball and streamer were nice ideas, but they really get in the way visually in such a small space. There's also an issue with everyone's height and the stiffness of their poses, the alien in particular. So I raised the werewolf up on a platform and tried some clips to make it like the alien was jumping or hovering in the air to take his photo (being so short):

But I only had a clip in dark brown, which didn't work with the nougat colored tiles I was going to be using, and also stuck up distractingly from the floor's surface. The angle on one trans-clear bar with angled hollow stud was simply too sharp to use alone, but by stacking two of them I could rotate and better adjust the angle. Because this lifted the alien up much higher, I also removed the DJ platform, to keep each minifigure's head on a different level:

Now that I had the characters' blocking established, I could finalize the set design. I'd found another BeatBit tile with a singing mouse, and thought that would be a cute little addition to tuck into a corner, along with a DOTS unicorn tile. Another trans-clear bar with angled hollow stud allowed me to mount the disco ball tile in the corner, to hearken back to my original idea without taking up nearly so much space. The wood planking and topographical map also point to the other prompt of "camping":

And that was it! All I had to do was put the minifigures back in and the build would be done...

I put it away for the night, but on coming back to it the next day, I had a feeling that something wasn't quite right. For one, adding the double layer of black plates and tiles to finish off the top edge was actually too tall for the cube to close properly. But more importantly, the minifigures' placement just wasn't sitting right with me.

As you can see from the picture above, while each minifig is at a different height, the floating alien really takes up a ton of the view...and all we see from most angles is his back, which means his big alien eyes are obscured, downplaying what he is and undercutting the fact that I built this MOC to fit the them of "alien". Going back through my photos, I saw that having him flat on the floor wasn't so bad, and then I glanced at the box for the Spring Lantern Festival (which I have yet to build) and saw the woman with the selfie stick. Putting those together gave me a solution.

Using a teal 1x2 cell phone tile to tie in with the other cool colors in the predominantly warm design, I built a mini version of the selfie stick. Now the alien could face out as he takes a selfie with his monstery buddies, making him the build's visual focus and also engaging with the viewers; I also added a red soda can to the foreground to relate to the red elements as well as to add a bit more visual detail to the build. Since I needed a SNOT bracket to hold the map, I had to leave the top edge with exposed studs, but at least the cube closes now (to keep the party dust-free).