Topic: Brickfilm of the Week: Little Guys! (April 24, 2015)
This week’s Brickfilm of the Week is Little Guys! by David Pagano.
Little Guys! is a faux-commercial made in the style of a 1980s toy commercial advertising a fictional toy known as Little Guys. It was made in 2007 by David Pagano and went on to win two Brick Award for Film Arts awards: Best Film and Best Animation. David Pagano was a Brickfilms.com member, and is currently a Bricks in Motion member and is the co-creator of The Set Bump, a blog about brickfilming. He frequently works with The LEGO Company to produce promotional short films featuring LEGO. His personal projects include Playback and the in-production follow-up to Little Guys!, Little Guys in Space!
SPOILERY DISCUSSION BELOW!
With only a few exceptions, brickfilms characters are LEGO minifigures. While heads and torsos and legs can be swapped, they all stick to the same scale and shape: just under 1.5 inches tall, and seven points of articulation. Little Guys! ignores the minifigure altogether, and utilizes basic LEGO bricks to create not only the large-scale environments, but the characters as well. This freedom allows for the creation of many different expressive characters. Compare the round-faced grandpa to the straight-laced executive, or the playing children to the interviewed adults. By building his characters out of LEGO, Pagano has achieved a very distinct visual style that has only been mimicked by a few.
What are your thoughts on Little Guys!? What did you like about it? What do you think of the use of brick-built puppets? Did you have a favorite moment?
