Let's start with another series of stop-motion animations I've shot for The LEGO Group, Universal Pictures, and Dreamworks. This time they'll all be about sets from the Netflix series Jurassic Park: Chaos Theory.

They premiered over a year ago on official LEGO channels. This particular one was the least well-received, garnering around 600k solo views and around 1.2 million views in the entire series compilation video. In my opinion, that's still a very good result.

I constructed the entire plot to effectively incorporate LEGO set 76965 - Dinosaur Missions: Stegosaurus Discovery.

I invite you to watch the animation first and then read the rest of the article below.

In no other video have I ever included so many Easter eggs and micro-references to my other videos. The museum includes most of them. There's a lot of "encrypted" content on the login screen. Fans of Terminator, ornithology, cannabis, or general cybersecurity (see admin password) will find something for themselves there. There's also my name on it.

When the characters browse dinosaur materials on the computer the videos you see are fragments of my previous productions. The same goes for the videos playing on the screens in the museum's rooms.

The museum itself (or rather, its entrance) reminded me of the town hall from "Back to the Future" movies. It's actually quite a classic shape, with four columns and a sloping roof. The resemblance wasn't intentional. But since that's how it turned out, I placed a figure resembling Marty McFly on one of the benches. Due to copyright issues, I couldn't use that exact figure, but I think it's similar enough.

This series of films was also important to me from a technical and visual perspective. I already had considerable experience in achieving a specific look for scenes. I constantly updated the studio with new accessories, such as lights, lenses, backgrounds, and so on. The number of LEGO bricks also increased and that's why I could make this forest. It is my favourite across all my videos. Each series was intended to have slightly different forests, as the action took place in different locations.

As usual, I'll add a few more random fun facts.

A squirrel jumping out of a tree trunk. I didn't have any squirrel sounds in my collection, and since I love creating new sounds, I recorded the voice of my then six year-old son :) I remixed it a bit, and that's how these squeaks came about. :)

I rarely use computer graphics or heavy post-production but this one was begging to be done. I "animated" the sticker that's in the radar trailer. Everything that moves there is digital and animated to match classic analog animation.

And another example of using digital editing. I don't always have the full palette of faces for a given head in a given color. So sometimes I use a yellow head and change it to the appropriate color in post-production.

Deleted scenes. The version you saw has two extended shots compared to what appeared on the LEGO channel.

The first is an additional room in the museum. The one with the T-Rex skeleton. The Universal team asked for it to be removed because they don't sell such a skeleton and didn't want anyone to think it was part of their portfolio. I was a bit sad about this change because I was very happy with this tiny MOC. Also this the place where there were some invisible special effects as cutting out the room and "stitching" the rooms together on the left and right sides required some manipulation in the editing software.

The second thing was to censor the scene where the Allosaurus eats the baby dinosaur. It was considered too brutal, so in post-production I changed the camera movement so it wasn't clearly visible.

It's worth mentioning that I filmed the swallowing scene, when the camera is already pointed at the treetops, about two days after the entire shot was finished. I really missed that detail. Previously, he'd swallow the little one and then immediately roar at the Stegosaurus, leaving the impression that something was off. Now it's one of my favorite sequences. From the shots of the Stegosaurus to the escape to the van, everything is captured in a single camera movement! And it is all from minifgure perspective.

And that's all for today. I'll also brag that I recently became a YouTube partner with my Kalais Bricks channel, and more content should be appearing there. Of all those Instagrams, Facebooks, etc., YouTube is the only one that actually makes me happy, and it's definitely my favorite platform for sharing my works. Besides this blog, of course :)

P.S. I'm also posting the original upload on the LEGO channel (the one with the "censorship"):