How come?
My favorite video game is The Witness. It's a puzzle game that appeals to the graphic designer in me because its visual language is very precise, geometric, and text-less. In it, there is one notorious puzzle, and recreating it in (digital) plastic bricks is a joke for a very specific famdom, which is most of the appeal. Nobody asked for this and nobody needed it.
This project began as a way to teach myself Adobe After Effects and Studio (a digital LEGO software) through a project I genuinely wanted to make. I employed stop motion, a technique I haven't touched since summer camp as a kid, into an independent study of motion, construction, and technical problem-solving. In other words, a passion project - the best kind of project there is.
The legwork
I created dozens of individual stills of the LEGO scene, then stitched them together in After Effects to create a stop-motion animation effect. Each frame became a small study in pacing. Too many frames and the stop-motion effect was lost. Too few, and the fluidity was compromised.
Playing with prototypes and lighting.
Messing around with the rendering features on Studio 2.0 introduced new variables that I didn't anticipate, such which angle to provide the light from. I also knew that the return on investment in building out an entire background was too little, so I opted to edit in a blurred background from the video game screenshot, allowing the LEGO panel to be the full focus of the loop.
Back to all work
