Brickfilm + MOCs: Murmeli - Groundhog

 I woke up this morning

And so forth

Groundhog day

Slowly turns into night

 I face the pillow

ponder things a bit

what is this all about

journey from light to darkness

Groundhog morning!

Groundhog day!

Groundhog evening!

Groundhog night!

Groundhog week!

Groundhog month!

Groundhog year!

Groundhog ETERNITY!

Yes, you are right: New brickfilm from Vuhvelituotanto (E. Karvinen & E. Okkonen)! This is a Tekrafilm, which means it is a film with Tekramusic on it. This is our second tekrafilm; The first was Märkä Saippua (Wet Soap) and somehow I missed to blog about it, despite it being artistic and groundbreaking music movie. 

This song, Mumeli, is tragic story about rodents and everyday life written and composed by J. Hyrkäs (The translation here was done by me to make thing clearer to ones not familiar with our outstanding Finnish language). The newest tekra-album had 12 tracks and we chosed the shortest one (or one of two 1:14 songs) as we don't have all day (except that I do - for a while). Filming took something like two hours. Building the set pieces took significantly longer. I have no idea about the post-production, it's not my concern.

This film had two set ideas. Another one was this Groundhog's bedroom. It is rather advanced brickfilm set, being almost studless and far bigger than minifig scale (let's call it Groundhog scale). LUGBULKed sand green bricks and brick bricks created nice wall profile; with the tan floor it remind me of my building room. There had to be a bed too, as it is indeed bedroom. Actually there was two different beds, this one used on set piece pictures, and another so called "effect-bed" used in the film, with internal "groundhog hinge" and slot for our anxious animal. You might spot the difference!

Other furniture and set dressing was added; bedside table, reading lamp, potted plant, some books, alarm clock and a glass of water. These turned out useful during the filming, as most of the exciting script was improvised. 

There was also this another, even more progressive set piece, that I'll call "Groundhog Eternity". You have probably seen some cool gradient backdrops on vignettes and such, but we have moving gradient times-of-day backdrop n our film! This is rather tall MOC, probably my tallest, being over 60 cm (two feet) tall. It's mostly build using basic bricks but has some special bits too. The sun design (hands on a plate) is stolen from some ancient Barney Main's vignette.

So, we placed the simple "outdoors" set at the edge of a table, made a tall pile of science magazines next to it placed our "Groundhog Eternity" on the pile. Then we removed the magazined two or three at the time, setting the sun, lowering the moon and bringing the night. On his post-production duties Esko made it faster, inverted it and used other data tricks to make it works. Odd stuff! I actually also tried to build a rising/lowering mechanism tha used some TECHNIC tyres to roll the backdrop, but it was just too heavy to work. Sometimes simpler is better.