Applied Animation Development: My Day Animating with Lego

So when I had the idea to animate with Lego it seemed like a slightly far fetched, definitely experimental idea. I knew I wanted to animate with it for something, but what exactly I had yet to figure out. The idea to use it to animate the background of my applied animation seemed like a good one because it is incredibly accessible to young people. I'm fairly certain that anyone within the age range of five to eighteen would be familiar with Lego. I feel that therefore, incorporating Lego into my animation makes my animation more accessible to viewers, the idea of incorporating something that is typically associated with happy memories of childhood that we can all relate to.

Animating with Lego would be a far easier way to create a background than my original idea to film footage and then rotoscope my backgrounds... or so I had thought. When I was a kid I used to make Lego animations that featured an action figure Godzilla destroying a city and I remember these animations as being fun to create and not particularly labour intensive. But now returning to animating this medium, I found the process far more challenging. 

I found that I would get confused about what bricks go where and often when I played back the footage I would find that I had lost track of the bricks I had used and it would look all jumbled up. 

After many failed attempts and around four to five hours later I had created many, many frames. Some sequences were good and consistent, others were jumbled and messy. I took the frames off dragon frame and spent another day importing them into my own animation behind what I had already animated, saved each individual image as a final frame, placed these frames onto premier and played back five seconds on animation.

My results were very successful, at first I thought the backgrounds might be too vibrant but on further viewings I feel it complimented the animation. The feedback I received was also possible with Oscar saying that the animation was original and he liked how he'd never really seen Lego animated as a background for an animation before.

Animating Lego for a background was an experiment, but I feel this experiment payed off.