Bills mosaic made of Legos at Highmark Stadium

Buffalo, NY (WBEN) One more new thing you'll see at the new Highmark Stadium is a new mosaic made of out Legos. 85,000 Legos to be exact.

Santiago sys his Lego club BuffalUG found out about the project, and pitched it. "It's through the Buffalo Bills Public Art Program, and we competed with hundreds of local artists and teams of artists, and we're selected as one of the 45 teams, and so we had about a year to plan it, and that was logistically, something that we've never done on this scale. And in doing a lot of research, it was something that we really could hardly find somebody who it was hard to find people who had done something on this scale in such a public way before, and then to make it even harder, what we do was decided to have the community build it.," explains Santiago.

The mosaic is called the 12th Men in Pieces. Santiago says it embodies the spirit of the fandom. "We have cheering fans, tailgating fans. We show the city of Buffalo downtown in the background, and we have the new stadium. It's kind of the center point and focal point of the piece," says Santiago.

Going about it was not an easy task. "We had over 2,000 community members, and we went all over. We went to UB. We did stuff with the the VA, the Veterans Hospital. We went to the Buffalo Zoo. We worked with tons of different community partners to to build this, so we had a little pop up tour," says Santiago.

He also didn't want it to look generic. "There's software that converts images into Lego mosaics. But what we didn't want was 2,000 anonymous people. We wanted to be able to track that. So the interesting part was I actually developed personally a software that could facilitate breaking everything down into 2,000 sections and just turning an impossible workload into something that was automated," explains Santiago. "The software that I engineered has a QR code system, so participants could scan and find their spot on the map. I'm not trying to simplify the software because it's very in depth, but think of it as an Excel spreadsheet. Once you have those numbers and grids there, the way we did it, we used one specific element. It's like a really small Lego element, so that made it a lot easier. It was just more keeping the colors sorted and everything."

Santiago says he was blown away when he saw the final product himself. "it was the first time I had seen it all together because we did it in three components, and I was blown away, like seeing it, and we made it. I designed it, and like we made it. And I spent like like I said over a year with it, but seeing it on the wall in the new stadium, it definitely was overwhelming. It was humbling being somebody born and raised in Buffalo, and to create something like that and see so many people come together blindly to build something that they had no idea what they were building, it was just it was very overwhelming to say the least," says Santiago, who notes it took three months to put together.

The mosaic is at Gate B, Entry 4.