Crime Never Gets Old

During the pandemic I taught myself Lego stop motion animation because there was nothing else to do. Because of the childish nature of the medium I use I’ve been teased for having a Lego YouTube channel. My main motivation behind this film was to legitimise Lego stop motion as an artistic medium. Conveniently I wanted to make a film noir for this project; so that allowed me to remove any distracting bright colours in the bricks by fully desaturating it. Film noir also allowed me to do more interesting cinematography with lighting and camera angles. I treated every frame as if it was a photography piece that needed to look perfect (which made some shots take up to twenty minutes to get right). In order to look straight out of a 1940s film noir I only used at most two lights per shot. I alternated between using two of the three lights in the three point lighting method; this cast shadows on faces from hats and made the environment significantly more menacing. Whenever the machine gun was fired I would have a super bright light pointed at where the gun was facing, giving me a really interesting looking muzzle flash in an otherwise dark shot (and I was able to have gunfire be seen from inside a building from an exterior shot). This film looks visually different from any other Lego stop motion I’ve ever made, the cinematography and Mise-en-scène significantly aid me in my goal of looking professional and serious.

While the visuals look serious, the narrative of this film is quite possibly the opposite. I had a hard time deciding on what kind of story I wanted to write for quite a bit because I couldn’t think of anything dark and gritty that I liked; then a friend of mine pointed out that the audience will associate Lego with comedy so they’ll think it's a comedy no matter what. Looking at the film with that mindset I decided to make a film inspired by one of my favourite comedy series of all time, Police Squad! Only instead of having silly characters in a serious environment, I put serious characters in a funny environment. I based Wendell Kent’s internal monologue off of Frank Drebin’s from Police Squad! As for the character himself, I based Wendell Kent off of Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (hence Marlowe’s special thanks credit, which is also a nod to Police Squad! because they used fake credits all the time). The idea for the narrative stemmed from an internal fear of mine of losing my essence when I’m old. I still want to have a life rather than be someone who doesn’t do much during the day aside from bingo. The Senile Six lead a life of crime in order to continue to play bingo all the time, balancing something arguably mundane with excitement.

The production itself was very difficult for this film due to the fact that I suffered a concussion right before March break started, which prevented me from animating during the perfect time to stay up late filming. The concussion set me back about a week, which really screwed me over in the end because I had to rush the editing. I’m very happy with what I created, but if I were to do it all over again I would’ve worked a lot more in the evenings following the concussion recovery rather than continuing to move at the originally planned pace.

While the production was very difficult, I am super proud of the final product and I think it worked out exactly how I wanted it to. I made an art piece that I consider to be on the same level as my live action films, which is exactly what I wanted to do.