[RSS]: Designer insight: Michael Svane Knap

Ноември 27, 2023

Many LEGO set designers use our BrickLists feature to maintain a list of the sets they've worked on and often provide interesting insights about their involvement.

Once a week we publish an entry from one of their lists on the home page to increase awareness of this information and to encourage more designers to create them.

Michael Svane Knap wrote this about their work on 71735 Tournament of Elements:

The Tournament of Elements is one of my personal favorite seasons. With this set, I wanted to mimic a bit of the same style of a set that I did with the gamers market where it's a figure pack with a smaller build to it.

However, I wanted to beef up the build a bit more and keep it as close to the reference of the interior in Master Chen's palace as possible. The build itself is made so you have the opportunity to connect more together and create a full circle, in that way you could create the iconic scene where the elemental masters have to find one of the first Jade blades. The intention was to throw in as many references to the individual story beets as possible within the restraints of the size of the set.

The centerpiece is inspired by the Jade-blade holder in Chen's palace. The Book is a reference to Claus's spell book with the page that he uses to transform into Anakondrai. The small crate has a pair of rollerblades as a reference to the Ninja Roll episode. The tree to the side is a reference to Gravis's fight against Turner, I had it in pink for a long time but changed it to green to fit better with the colors in the set.

The Two Asian vases on the second level are a reference to the fight Jakob and Skylor have, the idea is that you can hide the Jade-blade in one of the vases and have one guessing which one it's in to play out the fight your self. From minifigure side, we planed quite early to have unique characters in the set with the opportunity to put in the remaining elemental masters. Because of production issues, we could not fit Camille in the set.

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