Today, BrickNerd is featuring a guest post by builder Eric Law who has recently completed this stunning Grand Staircase from Hogwarts complete with moving staircases. You may remember us mentioning him just yesterday for earning the People’s Choice award at BrickCan 2021 for his Harry Potter Ninjago City build. Eric is going to share with us how the staircase idea began… and how he ended up with something entirely different.

What kind of builder are you? A digital MOCer? Sculptor? Architect? Free former? Or, even a mix of all of the above? Me, I’m definitely a “build as I go” type of guy. But don’t get me wrong, I like to plan out my builds ahead of time so I can get the needed bricks to build. For instance, when I wanted to build a Weasley’s Joke Shop I had a vision from start to finish that never changed. When it was finished, it pretty much looked like the original plan I made before I even bought my first purple brick.

My next MOC was the complete opposite with my mad scientist mash-up build that was Harry Potter Ninjago City. There was no plan. Why? Well, COVID happened. I got laid off, had a ton of brick at my disposal, had a crazy idea after a few glasses of wine, and with no planning at all and after seven months, it was done! I just literally put piece after piece on it, and 70,000 pieces later, I had a wonderful chaotic mess of a build that I was pretty proud of.

But this article is not about those types of builds—it’s about the idea that sometimes your final MOC is in fact nothing you planned, and sometimes, it’s a better piece because of it. This is the story of my newest MOC. If you look at it now, you might never have known that it started out as something entirely different. As you can see, it’s the moving staircase scene from the first Harry Potter movie, The Philosopher’s/Sorcerer's Stone when Harry first sees all the talking moving portraits. But, when I started it in January, I had no plans to build a moving staircase build.

How was this MOC started? One day, I got a message from a friend that there was a group of builders that wanted to do a large collab of the Battle of Hogwarts from the last movie. And naturally, my friend thought of me to join. The plan was that 10 people would do two MOCs each. There was a list of 20 scenes of different times during that Battle. Since I joined the group last, I got the last pick. One of the scenes I had to do was the scene right after Harry reveals to everyone that he is not dead. Harry then runs into the castle and up the stairs, he has a quick clash with Voldemort on those stairs.

Don’t remember that scene? Well, there is a reason: it’s boring. It wasn’t what I would have picked, but that’s the scene I had to do. So I started to build. If you look at the bottom of this MOC, I started out by building portraits in different stages of damage from the battle. I had also started building rubble and magically blown up parts of the castle.

Then all of a sudden, the project just ended. I decided to leave the collab for “reasons” and this MOC sat like this for over a month untouched on my build table. As a matter of fact, I almost took it apart. But, I liked what I had built, and decided to salvage it. Right away I thought that building the moving staircase scene from the first movie would be the way to go. I’ve seen a couple of great builds based on this before using the minifigs as portraits before, but in those MOCs the movement was not motorized and I thought that it would be more eye-catching if the stairs moved intermittently on their own.

With very little experience with moving parts, I had to recruit my 12-year-old son for his thoughts and expertise. He’s on his school’s LEGO Mindstorms team. He explained to me that for what I wanted, Mindstorms was the way to go. Luckily I had two EV3’s and five servos that were gifted to me from before I was an AFOL. I dove into the moving parts with trial and error until the first stairs were built and moving with a lot of help from my son with the programming of the smart bricks.

After I got the stairs moving, I felt that this was not as epic as I remembered from the movie. I wanted to capture the grand scale of that scene. If I was going to do this right, I needed at least four moving stairs—and it needed to be tall. So, like my Ninjago build, I just started to put piece by piece with the goal to fit in as many portraits and medieval sword/helmet/shield parts as possible. As I built, I added other fun things such as floating Hogwarts ghosts, house flags, knights, and many other fun Easter eggs (now, try to find Scooby-Doo!). And since I had one more motor? I decided to make one of the ghosts moving as well to make it look like he is floating.

As the Grand Staircase kept on growing I realized something important later on—it’s one solid build and all connected and not modular like my last three large builds. It had to fit in my van so I can transport it to cons and shows, so I grabbed a tape measurer and went to my van to measure the back hatch to make sure I didn’t have to rent a box truck in the future. I decided not to build a wall or side backing for a few reasons. One, it is already a big heavy beast and didn’t want to add more weight. Two, I have simply run out of brick. And three, I have invested a good bit in this build and didn’t want to add more cost to it. But, I have to say, the back of it has a charm to it because of all the contrasting colors I used for the back of all the portraits.

I had a ton of fun building this in a style totally different than I had before. Considering this MOCs journey from start to finish, I think it could have been a disaster. But, I love to improvise and think out of the box—and I did a lot of that on this build. Everybody has their own way of building, and it’s really enjoyable to me to compare notes with other AFOLs and use their ideas to help me improve my builds each time. I hope you enjoyed the story of this. And now, I have a lot of sorting to do.

Have you ever started a MOC and ended up with something completely different? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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