Troy

May 13, 2012 · 3 minute read
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Back in 2004, I was unemployed (okay, technically, I was a freelance journalist, but being honest, there wasn’t a huge amount of work going on) and had of time on my hands. My sister and I went to see the really quite awful Troy and we somehow got the idea that it would be great to do a stop-motion Lego-based parody. I built a Lego rig for my old Sony Cyber-Shot camera (this was before the days of iPhones where everybody has a HD camera in their pocket, after all!) and set to work.

It was not the greatest animation in the history of the medium, and that’s being kind. It was shot late at night, with little thought for color correction or stability, and with a lack of enough Lego bricks to make our storyboards physical.

(yes, Lego bricks. Not Legos. I may live here but I will not bring myself down to their level! Sometimes, Americans, you’re just strange)

Instead, I turned to doing a lot of the work in post. I built half of a wall with archers, then cloned it to make the other half. I added backgrounds, even experimenting with adding armies of soldiers completely digitally (it looked horrible, so I dropped it). Still, I couldn’t work around the main problem, which was that I just wasn’t shooting enough frames, so it was going to be jerky no matter what I did.

To add to that, the script is…well…let’s just say that it caters to Bonnie and me at the expense of the rest of the planet. There are a few good gags in there, mind you. Or at least ones capable of raising a glimmer of a smile. Not entirely sure about the obsession with towels was, though.

Anyway, there was a very long rendering process, and I mastered a DVD (which included a director’s commentary, because, yes, we were those people). I gave out those DVDs and promptly deleted the master. Not entirely sure why I thought that was a good idea; I had a copy of the DVD at the time, and I had the raw footage, so I assumed that it wouldn’t be a problem if I needed to make more.

Three years later, my copy of the DVD had been lent out to a family member with no hope of return, and all copies of it seemed to have gone to ground. My raw footage was spread across six DVDs with little to no organisation. Oh, and After Effects would no longer work on my new Mac, so I couldn’t rebuild it even if I could reassemble all the pieces. It was gone.

However, just a few weeks ago, it came up in conversation and Stacie mentioned that she had a copy. I don’t even remember giving her one, but so glad I did, as after all this time, I finally have some evidence of what I did in 2004.

And of course, the first thing I did was rip it and upload it to the Internet to ensure that it lives forever. So, presenting Troy, courtesy of Vimeo.

Well, we laughed, anyway.