March 12-17: Bring in your little one for 10 minutes of LEGO® DUPLO building inspiration! March 1-15: FREE Police Helicopter with purchases of $35 or more! LEGO Monthly Mini Model Build Sign up online for the March Mini Model Build starting February 15! Event takes place March 7-8, and is only open to members of the LEGO VIP loyalty program. Sign up in advance for a LEGO Disney Beauty and the Beast building event! March 4 & 11. February 10-28: FREE Exclusive Disco and Clown Batman™ Minifigures with purchases of $75 or more! March 20: Bring in one of your own Minifigures and trade it with other fans! March 6-16: VIPs earn double points on all purchases! Scroll over the calendar to learn more! See Printable PDF version REQUEST AFREE LEGO CATALOG STAY TUNED WITHLEGO NEWSMinifigure Ice Cube Trayproduct_label_list_price_accessibility 16 Reviews123451FIND MORE PRODUCTS LIKE THISChill out with LEGO minifigure ice cubes! Minifigure Ice Cube Tray Reviews - page 2
Free Exclusive Snowglobe with purchases of $99 or more!*Online Only*Free gift with purchase offer: Valid only on item 40223 LEGO® Snowglobe. One free gift per household. Gift set not available for purchase. Qualifying purchase must be equal to or greater than $99 in merchandise only. Valid through phone orders, on shop. and at LEGO Stores. Set is valued at a $9.99 (US) / $11.99 (CA) retail value. Valid only while supplies last; Come Play With Us! Bricks & Minifigs® is your one-stop LEGO® shop! We are the largest toy store of our kind, specializing in only new and used LEGO® items. We buy and trade all things LEGO®, from tubs of bulk to storage unit sized collections. If it’s LEGO®, we’ll take it!!Enjoy our selection of individual minifigs, bulk bricks, components and accessories. With the largest assortment of new, used and retired sets we keep your collection growing! Bricks & Minifigs is built on the principle of the 3 R'sREBUILD with thousands of pieces to choose from ensuring you'll have those childhood sets rebuilt in no time.
REUSE is our way or saying that we buy, sell and trade anything Lego brand and pay top dollar for it.REIMAGINE those sets you get from us by creating your own masterpiece straight from your imagination. Express your creativity brick-by-brick as you explore this colossal LEGO dream world. Special features include an eye-catching Pick-A-Brick Wall, hands-on play tables and larger-than-life Disney models.LEGO Star WarsSee allLEGOLEGO bricks are a classic building toy enjoyed by the young and young at heart for generations. At Walmart, you'll find a wide seletion of LEGO sets, all at Every Day Low Prices.LEGO sets let you build new and familiar worlds in creative ways. With LEGO Super Heroes sets, you can enter the worlds of your favorite superheroes, including Batman, Spider-Man and the Avengers. Enter the Star Wars universe with Star Wars LEGO sets. Recreate scenes from Jurassic World with LEGO Jurassic World sets. Or build your own urban landscape with classic playsets'>LEGO city sets.
Fans will also get a kick out of LEGO Minecraft sets and LEGO Creator sets. For imaginative pretend play, check out the LEGO Friends sets. And for the perfect introduction to building with LEGO bricks, pick up a LEGO Juniors set.With a huge selection of LEGO sets and other toys at great prices, Walmart has you covered. The Lego Store: Downtown Disney was merged with this pageSkip to main content You are hereHome » Currency Exchange - ATM Nathan's Accessories & ElectronicsLAKE WALES (FOX 13) - Legoland's expansion in Polk County continues with a new facility 10 miles from the Winter Haven theme park.It's called the Merlin Magic Making Hub."It's a brand new production facility to make Lego models for Merlin attractions all around the world," explains Ryan Wood, the model shop supervisor. "The kind of models we make here are typically for mini-land attractions within the Legoland and Legoland Discovery Center parks."Wood says his team also makes larger models displayed in the theme parks, like people and animals.
The new facility had its grand opening last week and has nearly 50 model designers and builders on its growing staff.Merlin Entertainment, Legoland's parent company, looks to hire an addition 20 model builders."This is definitely very much a dream job," says Max Petrosky, a Legoland model builder. "When you're a kid you play with Lego, you know? To actually make a living, actually working with Lego, it's just really incredible."Wood says, like Petrosky, most model builders started playing with Lego as a kid.I explained a local news story in stop-motion Legos. The first day of my internship on the data team at the Tampa Bay Times, my editor pulled me into an office and gave me an unusual assignment. Two of our reporters had spent months studying a big road project called Tampa Bay Express that would reshape our region’s interstates for decades to come. He asked, “Can you build a scale model of the project in Legos?” I had no idea. Growing up in China in the early ’90s, Lego was not part of my childhood.
I had never touched a Lego brick. But it sounded like fun. And as I learned more about the road project, the idea of using Legos began to make more and more sense. Writing about transportation plans is always hard. Although the plan for TBX has been discussed for years, to most of our readers, it still feels very abstract. We wanted a way to make it more concrete — to help our readers see what the project would do for themselves. Lego sounded like a possible answer. During my graduate study at NYU, I worked a lot with experimental and technology-driven storytelling. This project would make use of that experience. We hoped the crisp and playful visuals, as well as the established intimacy between our readers and Legos as a medium, would do the magic. So I went to a toy store, bought a box of Legos and got started. First, we assembled our project team: Caitlin Johnson and Anthony Cormier, the two reporters who had been digging into TBX for our paper.
We spent a day in a conference room, writing on index cards, working to outline different stories we might want to tell with our Lego model. Caitlin was the main writer for this piece; she moved into a desk next to mine and started reporting out those storylines. Meanwhile I came up with a list of questions I would have to answer to start on the visual side of the project: I watched dozens of Lego animations and tutorials, then started experimenting with those questions in mind. We decided to make a scale model of part of the iconic Howard Frankland Bridge. Being journalists, we wanted to be faithful to the dimensions of the actual road plan as much as we could. That meant we couldn’t use any off-the-shelf Lego road plates and needed to build it from scratch on our own. To be precise enough, I realized we would have to order the right pieces. I made a quick prototype in 3D modeling software. I told my editors it would cost $117.56. They approved it, and shortly the purchase was made.
After three weeks, our Lego package arrived and I got to work. I decided to shoot the bridge in stop-motion. That meant hours in our photo studio, shooting the project frame by frame. The most distinctive elements and scenes in the animation — the cars, the green shoulder, the ship, the toll rising above the road — all came from moments of frustration. But by keeping myself immersed in the tiny Lego world I built, I found inspirations began to flow. It took a lot of trial and error. The first draft looked very short and too industrial. To fix that, I tried adding dirt underneath and faking water with paper. It looked too raw. I also tried scattering spare bricks everywhere to show the messiness of demolition and construction. That wasn’t very elegant, either. I went back to the beginning. This time, I tried adding some lights and changing the camera angle. Anthony ordered an extra $14.04 worth of blue Legos, to make the water shine. I built a tiny boat, too — just for fun.
That moment of whimsy led to a shot like this. I used Photoshop to strip off the muddy background.I was exhilarated when this frame came into being. This is what we wanted! That was only one frame, though. To tell our story, I needed many more. I shot them one by one, adjusting the model and moving the camera’s tripod from position to position to get each angle. Then I stitched the frames together into “sprite sheets” — long photos containing every frame stacked on top of each other, like a stretched-out flipbook. I wrote computer code to tell web browsers how to play those sequences as an animation. While I was happy with our progress, we worried it was still hard to understand the bridge’s scale. We decided to add cars. We figured out that Micro Machine cars would fit our bridge’s dimensions. We ordered a few dozen of them on eBay for $54.79, and we suddenly had this… Except in real life, the free lanes may be way more clogged than that.
I repeated this process this over and over to create each scene in our story. The final presentation had 190 frames like this — and that doesn’t count the many scenes we threw out along the way! Then I cropped every frame again, one by one in Photoshop, to create sequences that better fit mobile displays. By the end I had made 336 handcrafted stop-motion frames. The project took a while, in part because it took time for all the parts to come and also because I was working on other stories at the same time. But as we worked and waited, real-world events changed the story. In September, my reporting partners, Caitlin and Anthony, got a tip that revealed something we had all missed. The expansion we were modeling would NOT happen on the bridge, at least not anytime soon. Instead the state wanted to build a smaller bridge first. Caitlin called a number of local officials. Many of them were just like us — confused, and saying that wasn’t how they understood the plan.
Caitlin and Anthony quickly broke the story about the confusion over the plan. The development changed our story, too. Now we needed to do an accountability story that answered a different question: How did things go so wrong? We decided to add an extra dimension to the project: the politicians who were confused and the state officials who left them that way. Caitlin listened to and reviewed hours and hours of presentations about the project, taking note of exactly who said what. I was in charge of adding them to the presentation. Naturally, we decided to represent them with Lego people. First, we tried buying Lego characters online. Surprisingly, we couldn’t find a set that was suitable to be cast as officials. We then sent an email to the entire newsroom asking if anyone could lend some of their Lego people. Subject line: “The data team needs your help / legos” Our colleagues came through. We ended up with a bounty of Lego characters. All of this work did a great job of showing readers what the plan wasn’t and why people got it wrong.
We could have stopped there. But at its heart, this story was created by confusion. As reporters, we felt an obligation to make things clear and to show readers how the plan would have unfolded over decades to come. However, neither time nor budget allowed us to build the whole plan with real bricks. , a virtual world where you can build in Lego. Designer Martin Frobisher, my data team co-worker, jumped in and used the site to build diagrams of the bridges that helped us lay out the project’s timeline — which version of the bridge would be built when. With some Photoshopping and smart labeling, the virtual Lego became an integral part of the story. He built it in the waters of virtual Tampa Bay, not too far from the real Howard Frankland. After working on this project for almost five months, I was quite nervous the night before it launched. Luckily, readers liked it. We got many questions about how we made it, including many asking what software we used.