LEGO Shrek MOC: Fairy Godmother's Potion Storage

Making magic for a minifigure contest!

Key MOC Specifications

Theme/Style: Shrek CMF
Key Parts Used: lots and lots of reddish brown and black 1-wide bricks
Build Goal: Minifigures Plus photo contest

Minifigures Plus—who I always praise for the CMF complete sets and individual minifigs they sell—has also gotten into the habit of having a photo contest themed to the latest collectible minifigure line (first it was the art recreation contest, but then they focused more closely on Series 28 and Series 29, respectively) . This year's Shrek CMF was no exception, and the prompt was to create some scene, either from the movies or the builder's own imagination, using those minifigures: the original contest post was here, but in case it's unavailable in the future, here's a screenshot of the call for entries:

It actually took me a bit to think of what to actually do, what scene would at once be doable within my budget of time and parts, and at the same time be impressive enough to justify being built in the first place.

As so often happens, the solution comes when we're not looking for it. For some people it's when they're showering, or out for a run, or doing the dishes; for me inspiration struck when I was in my weekly aquarobics class. Because this sort of thing had happened before, I had a few months ago purchased a Rite in the Rain notebook, which works excellently well with a simple mechanical pencil, no matter how much pool water gets splashed on it.

Along with story ideas, musings on my place in the universe, and reminders to add velcro to my shopping list, I also in this instance added the first sketch of my idea:

Clear as mud, eh? It's hard to write neat when you're bobbing up and down like a cork on the waves, but it was enough to cement the idea in my head for later, clearer transcription. 

MOC Building Process 

1. Idea or Prompt

As mentioned before, the prompt was to build something Shrek-themed, using one or more of the Shrek minifigures. And as I usually do, I wanted to cram as much into the single build—and single image—as possible. I'd started by pondering what scenes would be buildable that contained the greatest number of the characters represented by the 12 minifigures (and animal friend accessories). I also rewatched all of the movies and holiday specials. It was like a crash course in the visual iconography and theming, and also provided the opportunity to see details and angles sometimes only visible in a single frame, and certainly not available in the average Google Image search.

It was with those movies rattling around my head that I went to aquarobics, and there my focus on the physical activity helped jostle some of the puzzle pieces together, resulting in the above sketch. As soon as I got home I expanded it, adding notes and color to further clarify my idea:

To translate, starting from top-left:

- Prince Charming in "portrait"
- add random bottles
- Fairy Godmother & bubbles
- Technic pin sides
- frog
- Mouse behind bottle 
- fallen "portrait" of Farquaad
- spilled bottle + splash & "Lumiere"
- circle or diamond stone floor 
- Shrek & Donkey
- stone
- dark [reddish] brown
- black
- lust bottle
- blue flower red thorns 

As you can see, I'd put in some Easter eggs, even so early in the process. Unlabeled are the glassed-in potion cabinet in the middle, with the tall blue Happily Ever After potion inside and Puss scaling the shelves to liberate it.

2. Preliminary Sketches & “Sketch Builds”

Now that I knew what I was doing, it was time to figure out how to get from sketch to build. Thankfully, I had designed this with the final result in mind—that is, making the build specifically to take a photograph of it—and that constraint had simplified things. I wanted the potion storage shelves to tower over the Shrek minifigure, but knew that if I angled my camera I'd need to build the top part wider to accommodate the dictates of perspective (hence the "Technic pin sides": I had originally intended to add removable wings to either side, flaring it out like an upside down triangle, so I could shoot from as low an angle as possible).

Being a great fan of the Disney theme parks, I also knew the trick—so clearly evident in Main Street's façades—of forced perspective, and so I designed the shelves to be taller and their contents more elaborate the further down you went. Black backgrounds would simplify the view (unlike the deeply-layered vistas of my Spider Society build) and the uniform shape and color of the reddish brown shelves would give a structure to the visuals. So I built a proof of concept:

As you can see, the lower shelf (and later, shelves) has much more space, its rear wall pushed back all the way. With taller shelves, that deeper back was needed to keep the black bricks from catching too much light and possibly distracting with glaring reflections. This would also allow me to keep the more intricate contents on the bottom shelves, with the bottles becoming simpler and smaller as the shelves moved upwards.

Confident that my plan was a success, and realizing just how many black and reddish brown parts I'd need, it was time to start the harvest.

3. Gather Parts

First, I went through my own collection. Whenever clearing up after a build, I toss the parts into rough categories: one bin for plates, one for tiles, one for printed, one for nature, one for architecture, and one for wallbuilding (as shown in this post). Going through these, I gathered up all the pieces I thought I'd need. Tiles for the floor, dark grey masonry-profile for the wall, interesting transparent pieces for bottles, and so many bricks and plates to make up the shelves themselves. It wouldn't be enough.

I actually made two trips for more parts: once to the bulk bins at the local franchise of Bricks and Minifigures, and once to the bulk tables of another local LEGO reseller, Five Star Bricks. I got what I needed, plus a few extra cool bits.

Then I grouped them by type and size, stacking wherever possible to keep things tidy: in later photos you may see plates mounted one atop another with a 1-stud offset for easy separation, or bricks arranged in alternating stacks. In this way, if I knew I needed a 1x4 log-profile brick, I just had to reach for the single wand-like stack of them, instead of having to dig through a pile like in the above picture.

4. Assembly Process

I started the build itself by making the shelves' contents so that I could build the shelves themselves with those elements not just in mind, but in hand. For example, the Fairy Godmother's wand rack and the unicorn horn collection (a reference to Jack Horner's hoard in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) both required 1x4 black bricks with studs on the side. Trying to add these pieces in after the whole structure was built would be very difficult, as I found out later when I had to rearrange a few pieces.

Even more crucial was the picture frame design and incorporation. I wanted to include a large (one might say life-size) portrait of Prince Charming, given how much the Fairy Godmother prized her evil son, and including a fallen portrait of the first movie's villain would add to the narrative nods I was including. In looking over the the figs, I also remembered how much I liked the Merlin one—as I stated in my review of the Shrek CMF minifigures—and decided that it would make sense that the Fairy Godmother might have corresponded with the old wizard, perhaps building up a friendship sufficient to justifying having his portrait in her workshop. After a bit of trial and error, I came up with three different designs of minifigure-scale picture frame, one for each fig. Charming's is bright yellow, both because I wanted it to stand out from the other two and from the shelves...and because that was the only color I had those specific parts in.

The Farquaad frame is the smallest, his massive hat just barely fitting behind the 4x4 round-cornered plate with 2x2 cutout; the Merlin frame is tall enough to show his torso with room for his hat and the plates I stacked under him to approximate his waist; the Charming frame, on the other hand, accommodates his whole figure. Now that I had those set, I could start building the shelves.

It was at this point that I realized I didn't have enough bricks to go as high as I thought I would, so I switched tactics while I waited until I could go to the local stores to buy more from their bulk bins. I'd done some research into different types of brick-built bottles, and gathered up all the transparent pieces I had. I also rigged up a scale measure (in reddish brown, in the middle of the first picture) so I could quickly check how tall a particular bottle build was, from one brick to four bricks high (I had to make the bottom shelves taller so that the wand and unicorn horn displays would fit).

Then I grouped them by height so I could quickly see what I had and grab what I needed. Labels—even quick post-it or scrap paper ones—are really handy at times like this, to make sure that your categories don't get mixed and to make it easy to tell them apart at a glance. The slightly-raised subdivision of my Dollar Tree activity trays also makes it easy to keep categories separated but easy to access.

Some creative SNOT techniques allowed me to tuck in books, and to give one of the Three Blind Mice a nice drumstick.

To support the Fairy Godmother, a stack of trans-light blue 1x1 round plates with holes alternating with bar 1L with angled hollow stud pieces served both to act as a decorative element—almost looking like a cartoonish motion line—while also making the connection more secure than it would have been with just the bar 1Ls stuck into one another. A 2-wide cheese slope also kept the hinge plate from wobbling.

And so, like Jack's beanstalk, the shelves rose ever higher:

5. Decorative Details & Final Tweaks

Right at the start I tackled one of the references I wanted to put in: early in the second movie, we see the Fairy Godmother brewing a love potion; "a drop of desire, a pinch of passion, and just a hint of lust," she says, ironically pouring out great globs of the stuff from a large bleach jug-style container. Given that the scene I was building was going to take place in her workshop, it made sense to include that jug.

I almost didn't.

There is no minifigure-scale bleach jug LEGO piece, and I couldn't even find any MOCs online to help me out, so I spent several hours trying out different combinations of SNOT pieces, even adding red drips to some to evoke the viscous contents of the bottle. Ultimately I deemed these were distracting and it would be best to keep it plain white. I decided on the right-most combination, since the 3x3 circular tiles helped give a feeling of roundness to the whole shape. I also used my Brother label maker to print out a little sticker to help further prevent confusion:

The Fairy Godmother appears and disappears with a cascade of bubbles, and I wanted to add that in to make it look like she'd just poofed into the storage room to deal with the interlopers herself. To accomplish this, I used all of the soap bubble dome pieces from the duplicates I had of CMF 28's frog fan, mounted on a 1x1 white plate with a hole (to help it stand out against the dark background), and slotted onto a bar 1L with 1x1 round plate. These I could then mount above and beneath the shelves in seemingly-random strategic places; I used a similar technique for other 1x1 round sparkly pieces when I ran out of domes

Originally I had used dark bluish grey tiles to approximate shadows under the figures and props, but that made it look more like they were damp instead, so I had to rip everything out; I also realized that I'd forgotten to include attachment points for the potion splash, so I added that in as well: 

6. MOC Design Considerations

There are several points that are worth keeping in mind at every step of the building process:

Color Palette Choices 

Reddish brown and black make for a nice contrast, and obviously read as "wooden shelves with shadows behind. They also pretty closely match the look of the location in the movie. I had to take some liberties with the flooring: I didn't have the right pieces for the circular design, nor would I have been able to mimic the herringbone pattern surrounding it. So instead I opted for an approximation, using concentric squares, as you can see above. Just as I was toying with the movie's plot a little, I also decided it was ok to take creative license with the set design.

Physical & Thematic Constraints 

As mentioned before, I always kept in mind that this was going to be photographed. At first I planned on using a tripod with a low camera angle, but as I built I realized a better way: lying down. With the build flat on its back on my drafting table, I could get a more even and directional light set up, and could better control the shooting angle as well. There was just one problem: anticipating a need for structural buttressing, I'd built the back of the shelves 6 studs from the back of the baseplate. The solution was straightforward and effective.

Using the middle shelves, where a 2-stud shelf depth (plus the 1-stud back wall) left a row of 1-stud deep ledges on the backside, I mounted 1x6 bricks (I certainly had plenty to spare now) to serve as legs. As you can see, it stands securely on its back, with no need for any additional support:

Building a Story 

In the 2nd Shrek movie, there's nothing in the Fairy Godmother's potion storage room but potions. While I could easily have restricted myself, I didn't for two reasons: 1) I didn't have enough parts to make that many bottles, and 2) if I did that I'd be losing out on a golden opportunity. A golden egg...portunity [Puss In Boots first movie reference].

I mean Easter eggs.

I grew up with I Spy and Where's Waldo books, so I've had plenty of experience in seeing little details hidden in a busy image. I wanted that same experience here, so I hid the following references:

- the Shrek storybook, as shown in the first movie's opening, enshrined in a gold-lined cubicle
- blue flower, red thorns, the supposedly-fictional growth that Fiona sends Donkey to fetch in the first movie, allowing her to pull the arrow from Shrek's backside without his interfering
- a dethroned portrait of Farquaad
- one of the Three Blind Mice, enjoying a drumstick
- a frog, perhaps one of King Harold's old hopping buddies?
- one of the Fairy Godmother's "Happiness...is just a teardrop away" business cards, fluttering down from a pocket as she flies overhead
- the broken bottles of spilled pink potion that turns elves into objects
- the bleach-style jug of a certain potion ingredient
- lots of snacks...it seems that the Fairy Godmother's diet is well and truly shot (I can relate, sometimes what you want most is "something deep-fried and dipped in chocolate")
- Mr. Merlin, as he appeared in Shrek the Third 
- an elaborately-written contract, much like the ones that Rumpelstiltskin handed out in Shrek Forever After
- Jack Horner's rack of unicorn horns, from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
- a terrestrial globe, suggesting that Far Far Away is simply on another version of Earth
- a tesseract cube, suggesting the same
- an eyeball in a jar, watching the Fairy Godmother's approach...possibly with an eye to escape?
- an actual Easter egg, from CMF 28's bunny fan 

Can you find them all?

I also wanted there to be some action for the minifigures. The almost one-piece Donkey is understandably hard to pose, since only his head moves, and only then to pivot in one direction, and Shrek's neck makes finding a good angle tricky. The framed minifgs are supposed to be static, but I posed Charming as though he were waving at his mother. The Fairy Godmother is flying, and Puss is climbing up the shelves, about to reach the glassed-in shelf just like in the movie. Unlike the movie, however, I made him a little clumsy: he has knocked several bottles of pink potion off the shelf he's hanging from, where they shatter on the floor, turning one of the Fairy Godmother's elves into a Lumiere-style candelabra in the process.

In the process of designing a sort of narrative for the build, I had to break the strict chronology of the scene: the potion spill is actually later, when Shrek tips over a cauldron of potion to aid their escape from the workshop, and the Fairy Godmother doesn't show up until well after the potion thieves have escaped. Still, if the whole sequence were condensed into a single scene, this is how it might play out. 

7. Final Fairy Godmother's Potion Storage Build Gallery

Between testing ideas, building all those potion bottles, collecting more parts, and building the whole thing, start to finish it took two weeks, and an untold number of black and reddish brown bricks. It'll be great to free them up again, once I'm able to disassemble this massive structure, but I'll definitely be keeping the picture frames intact for future uses in future MOCs.

And speaking of other MOCs, there's a key difference between this one and others I've done (barring the other photo contest entries (like Series 28 and Series 29) is that my builds tend to be designed in the round, with views from all angles offering up different little details. For the contest entries, however, the fact that a single image is all I need means that I can ignore everything but that one viewpoint. This is, therefore, a gallery of one image, the one I entered:

I hope it does well, but regardless of what the contest's result is, I'm happy with the build's result. I learned a lot and challenged myself. Once I can take it apart the next challenge will be deciding what to put in a little 8x8 capsule to commemorate the larger build; perhaps just a segment of shelving with the Fairy Godmother floating in front of it.

Happy building!