Making Of

 

 

Welcome to the Making of "A Tale They Wont Believe".

So let’s start at the beginning shall we?

A while back Microsoft offered Office 2003 to Aussie Uni students for a bargain-basement price of just $75.

And to help advertise it, they ran a blog competition to see who could write the most original blog about it.

I decided to be stupid a write a story about King William Gates and his war against the forces of the Evil Lord Macintosh. And to illustrate it, I used photos of my lego castle collection (which I’d already taken).

And strangely, I won!

So that scored me a Vespa and gear worth almost $10,000.

So that was great - but months later MS rang me up again. They wanted to start the deal again - and asked me to turn my blog into a movie to help promote it.

Now, I’ve never done stop motion before (except for a really basic test years ago with an action figure). I’d done a few live action lego movies (where they bounce on sticks) – and I knew that this would take a lot of work.

So when they said I had a little over 2 weeks - I knew it was going to push things.

And they promised me an X-box 360. Now, I’m a PC man. The only Consoles I own are old. I’m proud of the fact that I own two Atari 2600s – and slightly embarrassed by owning a Sega megadrive.

So I wouldn’t have bought myself an X-box normally. But I must admit, if I was going to get a console, the X-box would defiantly be it. No Wiis for me!

So it wasn’t a bad enticement - but in and of itself, not something I was all that fussed by. But then there was the challenge of making the movie – plus the fact I could say I did something on Microsoft’s behalf – which is geekily cool (even if you aren’t a particular MS fan, like a lot of my friends).

So I agreed to do it. Possibly stupid of me - but even so.

So the first night I started by rebuilding my lego castle sets that had been dismantled to put away. Fortunately I’d gone through my lego earlier in the year and sorted everything into sets – so the castles were all bagged with all the right pieces, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

But I quickly noticed a few problems.

The time. I’d been told I had over 2 weeks, and given a date to finish by. But the MS person had miss-counted, and I only had a week and a half.

I only had a rather small number of soldiers (5 Robin Hoods, 5 Lion Knights (including King) and 2 Wolf-men). That was ok when I could pose the photos carefully like I’d done for the blog, but for a movie it’d be rather obvious.

And I remembered I had a work trip to Melbourne. That would take up 2 of the evenings I had in that week and a half.

So the journey was going to be hard - but I started.


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