440 hours and innumerable cups of coffee went into this astonishingly faithful rendering of The Matrix in stop-motion Lego, made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the original movie. And we mean faithful: Trinity Help (named for the scene depicted) is a “frame-accurate” remake, which means that animators Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett “took all of the video frames from that part of the movie (that’s nearly 900 frames for just 44 seconds of footage) and reproduced them all in Lego.”
To put the amount of work into perspective, if Trevor and Steve wanted to make the whole movie in Lego (and allow time to eat and sleep) the project would stretch to 25 years.
The guys have documented the “making of” in just as much detail. The painstaking attention is quite ridiculous: the pair scoured the plumbing section of the hardware store for parts to build their OCR (Orbital Camera Rig), a piece of kit which allowed them to track the camera in any direction for the bullet-time effects. The camera itself was a Canon Ixus 850IS, with nothing done to the output but adding a custom white balance.
In fact, given the CGI-heavy production of the original, Trinity Help is ironically VFX-free. The effects were done solely in-camera, with not even wire-removal in Photoshop — Blu-Tack actually seems to be the most important tool here.
You should really head over to the site to read the full, scene-by-scene making-of notes. I have lost way too much time to it already today. There are some hacking gems in there, too. For instance, the bullet trails are made from sequins and flower-arranging wire. When Trevor bought them from the florist, two old ladies asked him what he was making:
“I am doing a stop motion Lego animation of a scene from The Matrix and I will be using the foam to hold wire bullet trails in place.”
“Oh, you’ll want dry then.”
I guess they have done it all before!
Amazing work, and the takeaway from the website is that this took a lot of work, but was also a helluva lot of fun.
Making of LegoMatrix [LegoMatrix]
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