Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - One more new thing you'll see at the new Highmark Stadium is a new Buffalo Bills mosaic made of out Legos - 85,000 Legos to be exact.
Eric Santiago says 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," said Santiago in an interview with WBEN/ "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."
The mosaic is called "12th Men in Pieces." Santiago says it embodies the spirit of the Bills' 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," Santiago explained.
Going about it was not an easy task, according to Santiago.
"We had over 2,000 community members, and we went all over. We went to [University at Buffalo]. 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," Santiago noted.
He also didn't want the mosaic 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," Santiago said. "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. 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."
The mosaic took three months to put together, but Santiago admits he was taken back by the final product.
"It was the first time I had seen it all together, because we did it in three components, and I was blown away," he said. "Seeing it, I designed it, and like we made it. And I spent 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.
The mosaic can be viewed at Gate B, Entry 4 at the new stadium.
85,000 pieces were used in a three-month long project
85,000 pieces were used in a three-month long project
