Learning by making
Swampy Bricks began as a way to teach myself Adobe After Effects through a project I genuinely wanted to make. I combined stop motion, LEGO, and The Witness — one of my favorite games — into an independent study of motion, construction, and visual problem-solving.
Recreating a notorious puzzle in a looping format
One puzzle in The Witness is particularly well known for stumping players. I faithfully rebuilt it in Studio, a digital LEGO brick-building program, using the medium’s physical logic to reinterpret the game’s design with care and accuracy.
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.
There was no client or employer behind the project, only curiosity and a reason to learn two new pieces of software at once: Adobe After Effects and Studio 2.0. The result is a playful technical exercise built entirely for the sake of making. In other words, a passion project - the best kind of project there is.
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.
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