The Drowned Lego: Ground Floor

Ground Floor - 10,858 Pieces

1. Initial Queue Area

2. Coat Check

3. Final Queue Area

4. Entrance Maze

5. Lifts and Holding Areas

6. Studio Exec Entrance

7. Studio Exec Prologue Room

8. PA 1:1 Room

9. Studio 4

10. Scales Room

11. Ornate Bedroom

12. Conrad's Dressing Room

13. Main Dressing Room

14. Studio 3

15. Mirror Maze

16. Opium Den

17. False Prophet

18. Studio 2 Hallway

19. Finale Stage

20. Wendy and Marshall's Caravans

21. Birthday Tent

22. Murder Mound

23. Studio 8

24. Restrooms

1. Initial Queue Area

This is where it all begins – the box office, the queue for the coat check, the wall where the cast list used to be. . .

2. Coat Check

It's the coat check. Where you, er check your coats. And bags, I guess.

3. Final Queue Area

Possibly the most exciting place to be in the whole building – right in front of the giant cast board, right past the shots table that no one actually buys anything at, and awaiting the final word for “go” time.

4. Entrance Maze

Dark maze with red lights. Actually, since there are no wrong turns, I'm not sure why we call this a maze. But so it is. . .

5. Lifts and Holding Areas

The final stop before you get inside the show proper. Somewhere over on the right there's probably a door – there must be, in fact, since people get let in through it when the lift is broken – or so I've heard. Yet I have no recollection of that door, even though I've probably stood in front of it dozens of times by now.

6. Studio Exec Entrance

The much more atmospheric way in for those who have studio exec tickets. The entrance maze, as represented here (and again, it's not actually a maze) is woefully underpopulated – I know there were typewriters, and glasses, and parts of Phoebe's drafting room models, so I made it entirely out of those – but the actuality is much more complex and varied. The photos on the black wall just after the waiting area correspond to those in the lifts, with the addition of Stanford, Alice, and Claude.

7. Studio Exec Prologue Room

This is where the prologue scene happens. The table is actually covered with dossiers, papers, and books, but any attempt I made at representing them wound up looking like an inlaid design, so I went without. The drink cart is also not particularly accurate, but I felt the thinner legs were more important than the lower level. And of course, shots don't typically come in mugs (and woe unto them for whom they do).

8. PA 1:1 room

The site of the super-creepy secret audition. The blue discs represent blue umbrellas. To be honest, I have no idea what color the scarf was – my gut says red, so that's what you see here, but that's based on nothing tangible at all.

9. Studio 4

The first of the large spaces on the ground floor, this is where Andrea and Wendy start their loop, where Dolores and Marshall have their first “date,” and where the Fool sends Marshall to his doom. There is another stand with umbrellas near the big light, but as you saw in the PA 1:1 room, my umbrella creation capabilities are limited. There should also be a hanger with some clothes attached to the nearby column, and maybe another chair(?).  Basically, the room is a tad more cluttered than I have it, but this is basically how it looks.

10. Scales Room

Sadly, this one's a little tough to see because I had to stick a big plate across the top in order to suspend the scales from the ceiling. To clarify – right underneath that plate is a chair, and a sliver of space between said chair and the desk. On the desk you can see the almost 4x actual size box that the watch gets put into. The desk is also covered with fake snow, but there's no way to do that without making it look like it's just made out of white material.

11. Ornate Bedroom

Another major set; critical moments for Dolores, Wendy, Marshall, and, to a lesser degree, the PA occur here. In actuality there are curtains running from the column near the entrance to the dressing room to the wall, and then off toward the other column, but I left them out because everything relating to the walls around there is already a mess due to the differing wall colors on each side. Better not to further confuse the issue, although I may take a stab at it for the next revision. Likewise, there should be blue draping down the columns of the bed, but there was no way to do it that wouldn't overwhelm the whole structure. The crazy submarine dial over on the small table in the nook is meant to be a clock face. The main table/mirrors set up is as close as I could get it to actuality – this particular area is one of the few that's very well documented photographically.

12. Conrad's Dressing Room

Unfortunately, this room is so tiny that I have to show it using a nearly overhead shot. But you can see the dressing tables on the right, clothes rack in the middle, and his somewhat undetailed 1:1 cage over on the left.

13. Main Dressing Room

Really, only the area behind the curtains is the dressing room – the rest is something else. I believe I've heard the term “backstage nexus” used, but I'm not certain. The grey object with the “x” crossbeams is free-rolling, used in a dance by Claude and Dolores and used by Wendy to reach her hidden box up in the rafters (which I have not recreated here). The wall leading to Studio 3 should actually be a light wood color, but the none of the options I had felt right, so I left it black. The two large wall panels in the center of the second image swing open after the show, increasing the access to Studio 3 - or at least, I think so.  It's the only way I can make sense of the different layouts of the room at different times. In the first image, you can also see the breakfast nook, where I always seem to get in Andrea's way when she needs into the cupboard.

14. Studio 3

Not my favorite place in the show – I always feel weird not wearing a mask – but, oddly, this may be my favorite recreation. It may just be that I'm overly pleased with my drum kit design. Anyway, one thing that this model completely fails to capture is the fact that pretty much all of the walls are covered with murals, which give an overall impression of darkness (hence the black pieces), but are actually fairly colorful.  Not to mention impossible to replicate. The red-walled section is the Luna's List area, and the colorful object in front of the mirror maze is meant to be a carnival game wheel, which should be subdivided into many more, smaller wedges – but quarters is as far as LEGO can break down. It's also much smaller in real life.  The colorful stall near the stage is where the old-fashioneds live – and if you're going to be drinking in Studio 3, that's what you ought to be drinking.

14. Mirror Maze and 15. Opium Den

Okay, let's just get this out of the way right up front – yes, I am well aware of the fact that the mirror maze is, in fact, built on a structure of triangles. But one thing LEGO cannot reasonably do is diagonals, so I've. . . er, re-imagined it. Despite this, the path through the maze (and the dead ends) do at least somewhat resemble the actual path, at least so far as the jumbled map I made (complete with a massive pen scratch across the whole thing from when I ran into a wall) indicates. I also decided to represent the mirrors with transparent bricks, rather than the light silver flat tiles that I usually use, because I felt it gave a more accurate sense of how the maze feels, even if it's technically less accurate. The opium den is an extra little area where some of the characters take their walkouts, and where certain white masks sometimes sneak off for a little alone time (or so I've heard).

16. False Prophet

Another tiny little room off of Studio 3. This is where the execs do the 2:1 and where they sort out contract details with Harry after he sings. Like Conrad's dressing room, I had to stick relatively close to straight overhead to see into the room.

17. Studio 2 Hallway

The large, open space that runs alongside Studio 2. The wrench-like objects around the door are meant to be scissors jammed into the wood (imagine the claw as the handles).

18. Finale Stage

Not much point describing what happens here, since it's in the name. The chains around the pools (represented by grey bars, here) often extend all the way around the pools, not just the sides. One thing that I had to leave off was a string of lights that dangles from the porch overhang.

19. Wendy and Marshall's Caravans

I cheated here – the caravan on the left is actually an open and accessible area of the set, but it's also the one and only space I've never been inside. So I just left it closed up. In addition to the Wendy/Marshall stuff, this location is notable for Andrea's trailer dance, which is spectacular and all-too-often ignored on favor of the birthday party right next door. At finale time, all the stuff out in front gets moved out of the way/up against the trailers.

20. Birthday Tent

There's really only two things that happen in here – Dolores's birthday party and the “Fool Suite” of two solo scenes sandwiching his performance for Lila. Well, there's also Eugene's casting as the Grocer, but it's sort of an extension of the birthday party.  Anyway, it's a pretty small, confined space – not on the level of Conrad's dressing room or anything like that, but when you have a scene with five characters, three of whom are the leads of the inside-the-studios story, it can get pretty rough. The translucent pieces on the side of the tent represent strings of Christmas lights. There should also be a big “Happy Birthday Dolores” banner strung across the middle of the rspace, but in these close quarters, that would serve no purpose other than to obscure the view of anything else in the room, so I chose to omit it.

21. Murder Mound

Here you can see the end of the room where Wendy murders Marshall, as well as a bit of Studio 8. I suspect that I may have made the woods a bit too thick, as well as possibly leaving a bit too much space between the two chunks of forest – but it will take a return to the show for me to know for sure. Note the hole that Marshall disappears into – there is a tunnel from there to the hallway between the mound and the stairway.

22. Studio 8

Another tiny, confined space, so the view is close to straight down. The color of the bed sheets is arbitrary – I don't remember at all what color they are. I also think there may be shelves over the bed, but I don't remember for sure, so I have not added them. To the left is the first bit of the path taken by Conrad and the Fool during their 1:1's, which continues down in the basement.

23. Restrooms

Unlike the basement and top floor restrooms, these were built in after the fact, so they don't show up on the floor plans. Fortunately, I have actually been inside this particular men's room a couple of times, so I know roughly how it's set up – and I did get a quick glimpse into the other side once when someone was exiting at the same time as me – so it's at least reasonably close. I believe this is where Luna's List people enter as well, and these restrooms are also the ones used for Studio 3 – so there must be some passageway through to the show. Never having been in either situation, however, I have no idea where – so that opening in the upper center of the image does ultimately dead-end, at least on this model.