Best Visual Effects
Bricks in Motion Awards 2024
Brickfilm of the Week
brickfilms.com
Brickfilm of the Week
bricks-in-motion.com
2025
Year
03:42 Min.
Runtime
16:9
Format
15 fps
FPS (frames per second)
Synopsis
A boy grows up constantly taking selfies, unaware that he’s neglecting his surroundings. When a dramatic incident changes his life, he realizes something is missing.
Film Facts
The film is lightly inspired by true events that occur every day around the world. The number of accidents, some of them fatal, while taking selfies is increasing every year.
With a few exceptions, I created all the sets for this film myself. This is very unusual for me, because as satisfying as the sets turned out, I learned once again that I prefer animating to building sets. Nevertheless, the sets made a significant difference and give the film a very unique look.
I designed and animated the social media app “Bricksta,” which appears in the film, using the Rive software. The animation was finally integrated into the film using Adobe After Effects.
This is my first film to feature AI-generated content, albeit sparsely. The LEGO canyon and the LEGO city skyline, which appear as backgrounds in two different scenes, were generated using the Perplexity AI. In the future, I will probably continue to use AI for such purposes, but never to generate any part of the film.
This is also the first film in which I use a lot of colored light to imitate daytime moods, among other things. Overall, the lighting in this film is much better than in many of my other films. This may be because a large part of the action takes place indoors, and lighting them seems easier to me than an outdoor scene.
In the wedding scene, a church can be seen in the background. This isn’t made of real LEGO, but rather a 3D model that someone created and shared publicly on bricklink.com. I rendered an image from it and used it as the background.
Fun Facts
There are two so-called Easter eggs in the film. Right at the beginning, when the father is trying to feed the baby, he’s wearing a T-shirt that says “I am your father,” a reference to the famous scene in Star Wars. The second one is in the bar. On the far right wall hangs a street sign for the Emirates Stadium, the home ground of Arsenal FC. A hint as to where my football loyalties lie.
I knew how the restaurant scene should be filmed from the first draft of the script. What I didn’t know was what the restaurant should look like. After many different attempts, I finally realized: I don’t need a restaurant at all. The background can simply be black, because the focus is on the protagonists in the center.
The script changed constantly. Some scenes were deleted to keep the film short, others were changed, sometimes multiple times. I rewrote the playground scene at least four times. During filming, I decided to shoot the firefighter scene. Before that, Larry (the protagonist) was a construction worker in this scene.
I thought for a long time about how to make it clear in the film that the same boy or man was always shown, just older and older. One idea, for example, was to give the boy a birthmark or something similar so he would always be immediately recognizable. In the end, I decided on the hat and the unique hairstyle.
The restaurant scene was filmed on a rotating wooden turntable. These were always available at IKEA, but I had waited to buy one. When I finally got to the restaurant scene and wanted to buy a turntable, they were no longer available. Luckily, my parents had a stone one they were able to lend me.
The restaurant scene was the last scene I animated. I put it off out of respect for the scene, because it was very important to me.
The wedding figures and the wedding arch come from a real LEGO set that my wife and I received as a wedding gift. It’s been sitting in our living room ever since and has now finally found a place in one of my brickfilms.
The running gag spider also makes an appearance, of course. Have you spotted it yet? It’s well hidden.
