Tet holiday, Tet holiday… What should we say?
We all know Tet is coming when we see the decorations everywhere, even the huge shiny flowers made from LED light on the central street of just some small plastic ones stuck at the end of alleys. The most interesting of Tet is the atmosphere of people preparing for Tet, rather than lazily enjoying the day. For us, the wonderful of Tet is simply a small corner of the street with a free decoration of street flower vendors.
This year, we focus on the noisy busy air on a street cross over one week before Tet, when street vendors start their yearly business. They fulfill the pavement with flowers and flags, and this video is to replay those activities. For us, this is truly Tet <3
The last small project to finish the year of mice, also the joyful time for us to do what we love. Huynh Khang plays lego and Zoi Op loves animation, then the idea comes up. We do stop motion video!
The last small project to finish the year of mice, also the joyful time for us to do what we love. Huynh Khang plays lego and Zoi Op loves animation, then the idea comes up. We do stop motion video!
Let’s talk about the lego build
1 – Pavement is the hardest part. We had to make sure it’s thickness don’t get over 3 plates to fit the scale of minifigure for animation. 3 plates height and the slope quarter curves, we spent 70% of time for 4 versions of this round corner; but the simply the best, we use the only lego part which can easily solve this question: part-58846. We also love the pavement surface tile, it’s lucky we have enough sandgreen 1×2 part!
2 – The CEE transformer booth – an electricity house that has been familiar to Saigoneer for a long time. They were repaint from yellow to blue-violet 2 or 3 years ago, and luckily lego has that color brick! The CEE letters on the wall also gave us difficulty, we cannot make it look exactly the same, brrr..
3 – We mixed some unpopular colors: Blue-violet & Light Aqua & Nougat.
4 – Figures. In the very first concept for photo shooting, we chose 4 Juniors figure because of their body ratio. It is close to the human body rather than minifigure. The problem appeared when we started doing stop motion, this type of figure cannot move their hands, and the lack of figure lead to the lack of cloths, stuffs, vehicles… That made us come back to the original minifigure with many kinds of body parts and related stuff.
For the stop motion making
1 – Doing stop motion, we spent the entire room for this activity. We set the continuous lighting, taped the tripod on the floor and did all the necessary preparations to have the stablest photo sequence. The result is kinda sweet except the accident of the tripod missing. We cannot find the good tripod and had to use the weaker one. That gave us extra heavy work – aligning hundreds pictures…
2 – We did some new experiments with animation. A manual movement and rotation was used on the entire lego while shooting instead of using the power of editing software. We set the frame rate at 6 fps to save time, and that low frame rate made the long movement become unsmoothly when watched in fullscreen. However, we still prefer that unsmoothly to the fluent easing transition at the beginning of the video, we love the rustic thing!
3 – A major difficulty of lego stop motion is minifigure walk cycle. Low frame rate reduce the walk cycle down to 4 steps, and doing that with many figures in one frame blew our mind, we couldn’t remember what is the next pose for every figure. That’s why we had to note down the pose for each figure, in every frame.
4 – Working with the brilliant red background for a long time made us feel sick, we had to get out for a break every one or two hours. And it become worse when edit those redly pictures on the screen =.=
. . .
After a long tough year of covid disease, we worried the pandemic has contrainsned this yearly activity, and it does. The market cannot stay crowded as usual, but the flowers vendors still arrive, at least 😀
We prepared the couple message “TẾT VỀ & VỀ ĂN TẾT” from lego brick with the meaning “Tet is coming – Go home and enjoy Tet”. And the darn covid suddenly came back, making our “go home” activity sadly become a risk of spreading viruses. However, Tet is still coming and we all enjoy Tet, our message slightly changed to “TẾT VỀ & ĂN TẾT THÔI” – “Tet is coming – Let’s enjoy Tet”.
Well well, Thank you for viewing.
We wish you a happy healthy and safety new year!!!
We wish you a happy healthy and safety new year!!!
- Lego builder: Huỳnh Khang
https://www.flickr.com/photos/khanglego/
https://www.instagram.com/khanglego/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/khanglego/
https://www.instagram.com/khanglego/
- Animation: Zoi Ộp
Agency: Brand Intheblack
01.2021
