Max heads to the docks for some fishing -- but he catches something unexpected. Made for the LEGO Club Show by Paganomation in mid 2010.
About this creation
Client: LEGO
Release Date: March 29, 2010
Third in a series of shorts featuring Max, the LEGO Club mascot. In this episode, Max heads to the docks for some fishing -- but he catches something unexpected.
The Adventures of Max series was a bit of a challenge at times, in that the episode storylines were somewhat formulaic -- Max enters magic LEGO door, walks around in unfamiliar land, somehow interacts with or is distracted by the activities therein, goofs something up, and shrugs. To contrast that, we tried to find something in each episode to focus in on as a new, interesting bit of LEGO animation. The first episode laid the groundwork for the series; in the second, we got to toy around with larger ball-jointed characters and light and smoke effects.
Needless to say, this is the water episode.
Overall design was pretty minimal; the set is a modified version of #4856 Doc Ock's Hideout. We extended the dock out and had it come to a right angle, and added the plants and such.
One of the parts of the Max series that I should have thought out better was the opening shot -- each episode has the camera pan start around Max as he enters the door, and end in whatever playtheme world Max happens to be visiting. It's a nice shot setup, but can be pretty time consuming. In this case, it was a bit tricky since the script called for the set to essentially be the ocean.
Solution: affix baseplates to the turntable edition of Scrabble.
The only other thing that really needed to be built for this episode was the giant fish, and he was a modified version of a model from #4401 Little Creations. We tried to make him slightly less terrifying.
Finally, to create the splash effects we looked at 8-bit sprite art for reference. LEGO bricks and elements can essentially be thought of as 3D pixels, and with that in mind we just (please forgive me) dove right in to the animation. The LEGO Club Show production schedule was pretty tight, and we generally didn't have time for animation tests or multiple takes of any given shot, so every shot of the water we animated ended up in the final piece. I'm pretty proud of how most of it turned out; the only thing I would have done differently in a second take would have been to give the fish a bigger splash.
Oh, and if you're wondering why the Atlantis submarine looks kind of weird in the water in the final shot... that was a glued model from Enfield. That took some figuring out as well.
Writer: Greg Farshtey Animator: David Pagano Sound Design: Tapeworks Inc.
