18.December.2000
Lego Liberation
"Lego Liberation" is a one minute adventure story at 1/50th scale, the epic struggle for freedom of an oppressed lego figurine trapped between the past and the future.
Long live the glorious Lego People's Revolution!
Story by
Alex Suter
Animated and Rendered by
Peter Douglas
Dan Perkel
Alex Suter
Kevin Wooley
Music from
Raiders of the Lost Ark Soundtrack
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Soundtrack
Animated at
SUDAC
Stills from "Lego Liberation"
New Venue:
What is the appeal of digital filmmaking?
Suter:
The appeal is in both the accessability and the freedom. With something as simple as a digital camera and one or two software packages people are making extremely interesting and entertaining movies. My favorite example of this is Buddha Bar where the artist used a disposable camera and then endlessly tweaked the pictures into a very visually innovative movie.
New Venue:
How does this differ in terms of digital animation?
Suter:
The freedom in computer animation can be a bit overwhelming at first. You can create images of anything you can imagine, but first you have to imagine it, and second you have to beat the computer into submission to get it to represent your vision.
We could have created "Lego Liberation" using stop motion animation, but I think we all had more fun doing the computer thing. You can get all sorts of camera angles easily, little tweaks like our protagonist's head popping up when he's surprised. It can be a slow process, but when it's all rendered and set to music, it's a wonderful feeling.
New Venue:
Does your protagonist have a name?
Suter:
Zak.
New Venue:
Why did you make "Lego Liberation"?
Suter:
This was our main project in the Digital Narratives / CG Animation class at Stanford.
New Venue:
What was your inspiration?
Suter:
I think the main inspiration was playing with Legos growing up. We had a great time going to the thousands of Lego websites out there. Best of all, Peter bought the set with the Darth Vader mini-figure so we'd have a model to work from. We put the TIE Interceptor together before class all sitting on the floor, digging through the box looking for the right pieces. I was having major childhood flashbacks at least.
Legos have evolved since we were kids. We wanted to tell the story about different worlds colliding, about different Lego sets coming together. How would a figure from a castle set react to the high tech world of the space sets?
I think we also wanted to violate as many copyrights as possible. Mission accomplished on that one. The story has a pretty obvious Indiana Jones inspiration. It's a good thing we make no money off this movie. Shout out to John Williams if he's watching.
New Venue:
When it comes to movies and animation on the web, what would you like to see more of?
Suter:
Nudity. There's clearly not enough nudity on the Internet. I think there would be a big market for it.
New Venue:
Anything else?
Suter:
I like the short, funny movies best. Outpost.com has a series of commercials that are doing far better on the Internet than they did on network television.
I want to see how far Flash can be pushed as an animation tool. I also really like seeing movies that do something that's visually new. Somewhere out there is a digital Picasso ready to take Photoshop or After Effects to the next level. I can't wait to see the results.
New Venue:
What technology did you use?
Suter:
We used every computer we could get access to, pretty much. The animation was done on Silicon Graphics workstations using Maya 2.5 from Alias|Wavefront. We rendered primarily on SGIs, but also on a few NT workstations running Maya for NT. Editing was all done on Apple Macintosh G4s using Final Cut Pro. We would have rendered on my Gameboy if we could have found a version of Maya for it. I now understand why companies like ILM and Pixar have fleets of computers.
We did all the work through SUDAC, the Stanford University Digital Art Center, run by Greg Niemeyer. SUDAC has a small cluster of SGIs and Mac editing stations. We also used pretty much every SGI in the main computer lab at Stanford as well as several big number crunchers in the Computer Science department.
New Venue:
Where else can we see your work?
Suter:
The Suter family refrigerator door has a wide selection of some of my earlier finger painting works. "Dog Next To Tree Under Greenish Yellow Sun" is my personal favorite.
New Venue:
What are up to currently?
Suter:
Kevin and I are working at ILM. Everyone but Peter has graduated Stanford and are living in San Francisco and working at various computer related jobs.
New Venue:
Any upcoming films?
Suter:
Kevin is working on a stop motion short. I'm currently assembling the software I'll need to do animations on my system. I can't quite afford Maya on my own as much as I'd love to have it, but there are many other great packages at more mortal-human prices. I'm thinking of a space battle scene set to some loud and abusive techno music. I'm interested in trying to get the physics and strategy of a real zero g fight right, making it look realistic and exciting, and learning more about the whole animation process as I go.
View this movie.
You can find out about other digital flicks in the New Venue Archives.
