Hey brick builders and animation lovers! This is part 3 in our behind the scenes look at the Steveston Salmon Festival 2021’s digital stop-motion parade, by us! Click here to check it out!
Today we want to look at the Marine Garage, which was more or less the starting point to our parade, and has been represented in miniature brick form before!
Check it out! This is a model by Peter Grant that has spent some time on display at the Steveston Museum and Post Office. It’s pretty great. Ours doesn’t have the pumps there, and is at a slightly different scale, but we made a lot of the same choices.
Ours is pretty squished by comparison, so we could also fit Ora Sushi on the same block. We built according to what was on Google street view, as confirmed by the festival organizers.
Lots of fun parade goers. Wyldstyle, Ray Shantz, The Taco Tuesday guy, Bart Simpson, Ninjago’s Kai, and even Clone Wars style Anakin Skywalker. Plus the typical mix of children, zombies, space monsters, and top end race drivers like you see in Steveston. All joking aside, we wish we’d had more of the short legs to have a lot more kids. They’re making shorter legs that bend now, which is great for animators!
Superman and The Flash are both filming up in Vancouver, so it wasn’t much a big deal to zip down for a few minutes to watch the parade. The cat came for the sushi.
The Joker’s on the loose, and I’m sure he’s up to something corny. Wile E. Coyote and Gollum are fun representatives from classic animation and newfangled motion capture respectively. You never know who you might meet in Steveston!
We were actually able to get this sweet ride from the Lego Store in Richmond Centre as a promo. We dug deep on their part wall, and minifig pick-a-part, and got some other things besides. We absolutely had to feature it in the video. Whether or not it actually belongs to announcer Bob is up for debate. He might not quite be the right scale, but maybe it’s just supposed to sit in the driveway anyway. It’s a McLaren Elva, if you’re interested.
Here you can see where the worlds of Lego and film collide. We only built what would be seen in frame, not entire buildings. In some cases, like this, it was just a matter of holding up the roof. As mentioned in previous posts, we were using almost every piece we had in a number of colours. The pillar on the right is made up of the small stands that come with Minifigs from the bagged Series series. If I really wanted to make this look like the back side of a film set, I could have put a little craft service display (buffet-style catering) out with a crowd of extras milling around it.
You’d never know about that back view, looking at the front. Just a couple of local businesses and a crowd. A group of characters like this is easy to make into a stop-motion crowd that looks alive. Moving a couple of characters at a time, just little moves, works wonders. Sometimes even having a frame or two repeat so that there’s no move is okay. It’s tricky to find a balance between too still and too busy, and the best way to to learn is to try it out yourself. Thanks for reading!
