LEGO Toyota Camry is go!

We've seen some wild Toyota Camry cars over the years, but this Australian-made model surely takes the cake.

Weighing around two tonnes and constructed from more than 500,000 bricks – including a high-tech Duplo core – the LEGO project injects a large dose of street-cred into the Camry. It is one of almost 40 LEGO pieces on display at the Brickman Awesome exhibition at the Melbourne Museum Plaza between March 21 and April 29.

We went behind-the-scenes with the creative genius of the LEGO Toyota Camry creation, Ryan McNaught, at his Australian studio near Melbourne Airport to talk about the world's only life-sized LEGO Toyota Camry.

Preparing to build an accurate, life-sized car, brick by brick, is a daunting task and so we wanted to know where does a gargantuan project like this start?

"We use a lot of snot," grins McNaught.

He's not talking about the stuff you pick out of your nose, rather the 'snot' technique.

"It stands for 'studs not on top'. So you work with your LEGO models with the studs facing in different ways. We happen to build sideways, that's snot building and this Camry has lots of snot work happening. It's a great example of this advanced LEGO technique."

Who knew?!

As one of only 14 LEGO certified professionals on the planet – and the only certified LEGO expert in the southern hemisphere – McNaught takes a huge amount of pride in his work.

Viewed from 10 paces away, the car looks remarkable. But up close the attention to detail is staggering. The contours on the bonnet, the intricate grille work, there's even headlights, indicators and brake lights that illuminate.

There's a certain elegance to the LEGO Toyota Camry that can only be experienced up close. And although I'm loathe to touch it at first, McNaught – or 'The Brickman' to use his nickname – casually says "you can lean on it, it's very strong."

That's because there's a special solvent used to essentially glue the bricks together. He hands me a couple of bricks stuck together using the technique and they're impossible to separate, even with my kung-fu grip.

McNaught says people are "absolutely encouraged to touch it – it's a hand-on model".

Building the LEGO Toyota Camry

Toyota has been on McNaught's case to create a car for almost a decade and the striking red Toyota Camry took seven builders more than two months to piece together and it turns out it's almost entirely made of LEGO.

I assumed there would be some sort of rigid core but it's LEGO throughout, with special Duplo core, kind of like the LEGO equivalent of aluminium.

The design process was long and involved, The Brickman explained, with extensive involvement from Toyota Australia engineers and also blueprints and plans of the car.

McNaught's team buys the bricks directly from LEGO HQ in Denmark and, given the number of people involved in the project, there's a lot of computer processing to keep the project on track.

There are no moving parts, which is probably a good thing, observes The Brickman, who says the ride comfort probably wouldn’t be too good – given the wheels are, well, a bit blocky.

One of the questions McNaught always gets asked is: How do I get your job?!

"That's the question everybody wants to know. I started with 2008 LEGO product called Mindstorms, teaching kids about robotics. The user interface was really quite poor. You basically had to be a Danish mathematician to figure it out. I was in IT at the time and even I couldn’t figure it out," he laughs.

"So I wrote some software to control it with an iPad. The LEGO people saw it, loved it and we started working together. We did more work together and it snowballed and here I am. Luck is probably the answer! Right place right time."

The Brickman Awesome exhibition comprises more than two million LEGO bricks and took more than 5000 hours to assemble, including a 7.5-metre tall rocket, the Tardis from Dr Who, a Kangaroo, Crocodile and of course the red Toyota Camry.

Over the years McNaught says he and his team has constructed more than a thousand LEGO projects, some large, some small, and says his personal favourite is the Colosseum.

"It's like picking your favourite child, you should never do that. But it's the Colosseum because its oval shaped. It's really quite difficult and technically challenging to make an oval with square and rectangular bricks. It taught me a lot, so that's my number one."

He says the fan favourite over the years is without a doubt the Titanic: "By far and away that is the number one, the second is the Saturn 5 rocket that took man to the moon and the third was Elvis the fire-fighting helicopter. People seem to love animals too."

As one of the most experienced LEGO experts on the planet, The Brickman has one final tip for us before we leave his spellbinding studio.

"Make sure you include yourself in your LEGO model."