Robots made of broken toy parts, stop-motion animation, and a great song to tie it all together were not on our bingo card for 2023, but the results are perfect. [Mootroidxproductions] recently released the official music video for I Fight Dragons 2019 song “Oh the Places You’ll Go”.
The song was written by lead vocalist [Brian Mazzaferri] with inspiration from the classic Dr. Seuss book. [Brian] wrote it for his newborn daughter, and we’re pretty sure it will hit any parent right in the feels.
[Mootroidxproductions] isn’t a parent themselves, but they expanded on the theme to create a video about sacrificing oneself to save a loved one. With a self deprecating wit, they take us through the process of turning broken Bionicle parts, bits of Gundam, Lego, and, armature wire to make the two robots in the film. He also explains how he converted garbage into sets, greebles, and lighting effects.
The robots had to be designed so that they could fulfill their roles in the film. From the size of their hands down to their individual walking gaits, he thought of everything. His encyclopedic knowledge of Bionicle parts is also on full display as he explains the origin of the major parts used to build “Little Blue” and “Sherman”
Click through the break for both the main video and the behind-the-scenes production.
I Fight Dragons themselves have a strong chiptune influence. Many of their songs make use of the NES, SNES, and GameBoy sound engines. They even used retro controllers, a power glove, and a power pad in some of their earlier works. We’re saddened to hear the band has gone on an indefinite hiatus. We just hope they’ll be back someday to make more great music — hopefully with [Mootroidxproductions] animating the videos.
Touching!
Love it ! Still, Ray Harryhausen is an all time favorite of stop motion.
Well, he simply IS the godfather of stop motion :)
This animation of Lego Bionicle parts is a popular thing. For example see 810NICLE Day.[1] For example, at [2] is the YouTube video for 810NICLE Day 2023 – Day 1. However, I don’t think the 810NICLE Day videos are made by traditional stop-animation using physical parts and pieces, to me it looks like maybe the parts are digital renditions – maybe? Given the historical on and off again availability of physical Bionicle products from Lego [3], perhaps moving to all-digital rendering of Bionicle-like parts is a good thing (the key thing is “Bionicle-like” parts).
1. 810NICLE Day – Homepage
https://810nicleday.com/
2. 810NICLE Day 2023 – Day 1 – Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61LM_FqZ7ag
3. Bionicle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionicle
Reminder to watch the film Mad God which recently came out. Okay, it was a couple years ago, but that’s nothing compared to the more than thirty years the guy spent doing stop-motion animation
My only (gentle) criticism is the lighting. The frames often look overly busy because of the similar lighting and detail of the backgrounds and the characters, and between the characters themselves. Complex lighting in stop motion isn’t easy- each light is a potential source of problems that can lead to distractions like flickering etc if anything gets bumped during animation. And more lights equals more heat (even with LEDs), which can cause all kinds of issues from melting hot glue and sagging sets to visual heat ripples. Because animation is slow!! I worked on “Corpse Bride” and we had something like 24 animation sets- without this parallel effort the movie would have taken years to complete.
That aside, it’s an impressive effort. One shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of taking 5000 still photos and having them match each other well enough to fool a human into thinking they are actually watching motion. And Mootroid did a great job at that!