Throw your Lego Star Wars games into the trash. How can they possible satisfy us now that we’ve seen what Grand Theft Auto looks like when re-created with real Lego?
If you’re not sure what I’m referring to, then be sure to check out the video below. In it a film group called Thefourmonkeys rereated the first Grand Theft Auto V trailer shot-for-shot with Lego. The process is also known as brickfilm or brickfilming. Check it out:
So, how did they do this? And who are Thefourmonkeys?
Well, Thefourmonkeys isn’t an experimental video-production club at some university. It’s a family of four who love to make movies with the toy building blocks. It’s a dad, a mom, and two kids. They don’t provide their names, mostly for privacy reasons. The dad does all the stop-motion while the mom writes the scripts and directs. Both parents occasionally lend their voices to the movies along with their son, 14, and their daughter, 6.
On its website, Thefourmonkeys explains some of the equipment and software it uses to make the films:
We are currently using a MacBook Pro for all aspects of brickfilming. We use Dragonframe stop-motion software with a Canon EOS T2i camera. We edit and add special effects and audio with Final Cut Pro on a MacBook laptop.
The family then does all of the posing of the characters and objects in the Lego world themselves. For this Grand Theft Auto V video, they shot 15 different frames of animation for every second. That means they did around 1,400 different shots for this film alone.
Thefourmonkeys submitted this film as a contender in the Machima Interactive Film Festival. This event invites all kinds of filmmakers to submit their game-inspired creations and then viewers can vote on their favorite. The Lego GTA V short is competing in the action/drama category.