Regular readers (hey mum) know that I like Lego. Star Wars fans will know that yesterday was International Star Wars Day (May the 4th, gerrit?).
To mark the occasion, and the brilliantly punchy, polished production values I’m seeing here, I give you Star Wars, in just over two minutes, as reported by a kid (and friends) packing the mother of all Lego collections:
Got one of these sitting on my desk awaiting assembly:
It’s a Lego Guggenheim. It’s part of the Lego Architecture series, picked it up a couple of weeks back in the midst of one of THE great afternoons, hanging with friend and collaborator Annie Ok in the MET.
I’ve been a complete legohead pretty much my entire life – at some point it became web design, and the shape of the blocks changed slightly, but the upside was someone started paying me to play with it.
These days, with some of the virtual world stuff we do (including, hopefully, imminent forays in Lego Universe) it’s pretty much gone full circle. If you don’t know what Lego Universe, best thing you can do is watch this:
Toy-wise, Lego got me young, and held me captive. It was a chance to tell stories and solve problems through exercises in form and function, powered by imaginative energy and intelligent design.
It must have been a busy parent’s dream to hear nothing of me for hours on end, nothing but the reassuring rattle of plastic bricks being shuffled endlessly around a wooden tray, signifying the never-ending search for that final piece.
Skip twenty years, as my Lego lies dormant awaiting a new generation of inquisitive hands, but my affection never really wanes. Then, somewhere along the long and winding information super-highway I now travel for a living, I found this:
Further investigation revealed that its creator, Larry Lars, is a bit of a legend – some of the stuff he’s creating shows a brilliant eye, and a masterful ingenuity, not to mention the fact that he clearly has one hell of a Lego collection.
In the throes of the resulting nerdgasm, and inspired by his example, I can’t resist rolling back the years.
I start out thinking I’ll go as close to Larry’s model as I can, armed with substantially fewer bricks. The switch to blue is a practical choice in that respect, but I quickly find myself rationalising this through the fictional narrative I’m slowly developing in parallel, imagined around and informing the emerging design.
Where the JCB colours of the original ALIENS power lifter were about visibility and hazard-warning, my lifter is designed and coloured for exploration on a planet’s surface, with differently styled arms designed to facilitate a broader spectrum of operations and manouevres. Developed by it’s own division of Weyland-Yutani, it becomes a different class, a different series, with a different set of classified documents informing the design. Suddenly I can feel myself on exactly the same flights of the imagination I went on when I was a kid – almost meditative, head and hands in gentle concert, story-telling through design.
Like I said – nerdgasm.
Larry and I are not alone though. There are more like us. In fact, once you start to dig, you realise (if you haven’t already, in which case you’re probably Henry Jenkins) that Lego has extraordinary potential as a form of fan fiction, and it’s starting to find big audiences online. I’ve seen a lot of pretty cool stuff of late, but the example that really hammered this home is this one:
Star Wars Lego is nothing new in itself – on the contrary, its one of the staple entertainment brands Lego have teamed up with to really keep their product relevant over the last decade or so – others include Batman and Indiana Jones, brought to market not only as off-the-shelf Lego sets but also as a series of hugely successful computer games, as playable as they are popular.
The web is already teeming with Lego stop-motion animation – an ongoing attempt to collaboratively swede the entire first Star Wars movie incorporates a large number of scenes and sequences recreated thus. The difference with a clip like this is not just the sheer technical accomplishment but that it creates something new within the Star Wars universe, invented and engineered by someone like you or I, and realised with a narrative verve and momentum typified by the fact that the bad guy wins. (I actually can’t remember being all that much more excited watching two Jedis and a Sith go at it for fifteen minutes at the end of The Phantom Menace. I’d love to do a budget comparison on the two.)
The imminent opening of Lego Universe will only add to this, and the machinima will surely follow – the animated shorts powered by the Universe engine, differentiated not just by Lego’s stylish signature aesthetic but by the signature ingenuity of the generations who have grown up with it, and are still waiting for a better medium through which to bring their imaginations to three-dimensional life.
I first heard that Lego were creating a virtual world of their own – Lego Universe – about six months ago, and I knew then that it had MASSIVE potential.
Now I see this concept art on the blog of friend and collaborator Annie Ok, originating from an article on Reuters announcing that Lego Universe will be launching next year, letting players ‘create online versions of themselves and interact with each other’.
I often cite Lego as the point of origin for my career as a web develop and interactive marketer. Even as a child I had an innate appreciation of its integral fusion of aesthetics and narrative, and the freedom this gave me to unleash my imagination in colourful and compelling ways. Truth be told, my inner child is pretty damn excited about Lego Universe, and can’t wait to introduce my actual kids to what I hope will be a world of consumate creativity and user-generated story-telling.
