DoubleBrick Fest - Russia’s First AFOL Event

Article by Alexander Horoshilov
Photography Courtesy of DoubleBrick

Our first AFOL event, DoubleBrick Fest, took place on the last two days of spring 2009. This was our first experience with a public event, as the AFOL community was founded in Russia just a few years ago. While it was small and modest in comparison with other annual worldwide known events and exhibitions, we’re very proud that we made this first step with fan events.

While we were planning, we had discussions on whether the event should be closed for invited LEGO fans invited only, or whether general public would be allowed to go to the event as well. We selected the second choice. Our local community is still pretty small, so some of our major goals were to popularize our hobby and grow as much as possible for next year’s event. For this reason, we decided to promote our event as a family-oriented event with free admission (participation was free also).

Our exhibition occupied about 200 sq. meters (2100 sq. feet) in total. The display area included two community-built layouts: City and Western. Members of the community built modules according to fixed standards and connected them one to another. The Western layout was a huge surprise for us. We didn’t expect the response , as it was suggested only about 2 months before the event and became very popular in that short time.

Also, we had several large-scale projects. Our local LEGO division, LEGO Russia, provided us with large amount of 2x4 bricks for the duration of the event. Two members of our community used them to build a large landscape. It became the largest MOC built and shown in Moscow (it used about 120,000 of 2x4 bricks and was 300 kg in weight).

Since it was our first experience with fan events, we learned a lot of lessons. Even with a number of various issues, we thought it was very successful. We had about 50 participants and for the two full days, there were about 800 visitors. It’s why right after the end of the event, we quickly decided to make it annual. We are going to make our next event better and to develop it and expand every year. With Moscow alone having a population of more than 10 million and about 150 million in Russia, we can definitely attract much more people.

Many thanks for the following for supporting our event: LEGO Russia, LEGO Community Development, "Premium Networks" company (who runs several LEGO stores in Russia) and the online shop "LegoSalon".

Translated and published with permission. Read the original text in issue #7, volume #2, pp.3-3.