LEGOStop Motion

Problem

Prospective high school students were being invited to UChicago's Summer Welcome Days with a postcard. A postcard is easy to ignore. The goal was to replace it with something that would make a student genuinely want to show up — something that captured the charm and personality of a campus that, once you've actually walked it, tends to speak for itself.

Decision

The answer was stop motion animation — and a miniature UChicago campus built entirely from LEGO. I designed and constructed the sets by hand: Harper Library, the Quad, Cobb Gate, Hull Gate, Botany Pond, and several other recognizable landmarks, all recreated in brick. Mini figures explore the campus, wandering familiar spaces, until they encounter the giant flying phoenix — UChicago's unofficial mascot, also rendered in LEGO. I animated the whole piece using Dragonframe, the industry-standard stop motion software, and composed an original orchestral score to match. Every element — set design, construction, animation, and music — was handled personally.

Outcome

The video went out via email to prospective students and landed exactly as intended: as something unexpected and memorable from a university that takes its reputation for serious thought seriously, but clearly doesn't take itself too seriously. The physical LEGO campus found a permanent home in the UChicago admissions office, where it continues to greet visitors. The video itself was eventually removed from circulation after LEGO raised a conflict — which, in its own way, is a measure of how seriously the work was taken.