[VIDEO] Jurassic Park - 30th anniversary - animation 1 (of 5)

On June 9, 2023, the movie Jurassic Park celebrated its 30th anniversary. On this occasion I shot 5 stop-motion animations commissioned by The LEGO Group and Universal Pictures. They were published on the LEGO YouTube channel where they were quite successful. As I write this post they were viewed in total around 6 million times. I invite you to watch the first video in the series. I will also try to write some interesting facts.

I am not sure where to start here. There was a lot going on. Making these films was a very intense and wonderful experience. It was the best job I ever had :) Well, maybe the second best because now I have an even better one. But more on that in a while.

It's been almost a year since pre-production started and I kind of regret not writing everything down back then. Now I don't remember everything exactly and it's a bit difficult for me to compose a coherent text. But I will try to do my best! :)

It was my biggest gig ever with LEGO stop motion. The five films made up approximately 12 minutes of pure animation. It was a huge logistic project. All five videos were filmed simultaneously. Everything had to be planned precisely to optimize time (which, as always happens - was too short). Virtually nothing was shot chronologically. The reason for this was the gigantic set designs and the time needed to rebuild it. The films used the same locations quite often and it would make no sense to set them several times.

Each animation used one of the LEGO Jurassic Park 30th anniversary sets. There were 5 of them and hence 5 films.

My tasks included, among others: taking care of the entire production, writing scripts, camera, animation, editing, sound and general "production design". I was helped by other members of WAWLUG (a local group of LEGO builders to which I belong) - BHs / Bartłomiej Huetter, Jetboy / Rafał Piasek and Liwnik / Łukasz Ogrodnik. We wrote stories together, built sets and scenography elements, which I could then freely arrange on the set. Jetboy also worked on some frame post-production.

This particular animation features the LEGO set 76961 - "Visitor Center: T. rex & Raptor Attack". I wanted to provide a nice opening scene and show how the characters get inside. I really missed the stairs leading up to the buildin, which I remembered well from the original movie. So I asked Liwnik to build some. It worked out great. In my opinion, they should be part of the set :)

When I planned scenes taking place inside the center it turned out that the set was too small for a Tyrannosaurus to run around. This is where BHs stepped in and built a wonderful, grand main hall.

The laboratory and the cafeteria were used straight out from the set. With some minor extensions. Animating the characters inside them was very challenging because they actually fit on your hand and everything was really small. It required a lot of gymnastics and delicate movement of the figures, fiddling with perspective, lenses, etc. I'm not even mentioning dinosaurs... Every day there were some problems to solve. But luckily I love tasks like this and had a lot of fun while working really hard to finish films on time.

I don't want to write walls of text here so more will appear in future posts. Stay tuned!

Update:
The next chapter is ready to read - check out it here.

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