Cycle of Life
A small project created as submission to the LEGO Ideas “Picture Perfect Memories” activity.
Datasheet:
Completion date: 05/02/2024
Power: manual
I’ve never participated in a LEGO Ideas challenge, until I came across the Polaroid-themed “Picture Perfect Memory” challenge. The objective was to build any scene viewed through a photo frame of predefined dimensions.
Now, I have a massive appreciation of the short film “Last Day Dream” shot by Chris Milk back in 2009, which you can see here. It gave me the idea of showing not a single scene but a series of scenes together forming a whole. Going through the challenge rules, I found that a single frame was a requirement, but there was nothing about how many scenes can be viewed through it and nothing saying that the scene couldn’t involve moving parts. So I’ve come up with an idea of having the photo frame with several scenes behind it installed inside a drum that could be rotated from one scene to the other at the press of a button.
As for the content, being a parent I thought about showing how my experiences with my children reflect my experiences with my parents; or, more broadly, how one starts seeing a certain pattern – a cycle, if you will – when you compare your experiences of having a parent and of being a parent yourself. Thus, I’ve decided to build a series of scenes that show the beginning and end of parenthood, and to make the scenes readable despite their small size, I’ve chosen to limit the number of participants to just one parent with one child. And since the scenes had to deal with the passing of time, I chose to pair a father with a daughter in order to make it clear that these are two different people and not a younger and older version of the same person.
Thus, the idea for a “cycle of life” series of scenes was born, with 6 scenes total, as 4 seemed too few and 8 – too many. On the mechanical side, I’ve adapted the stepper mechanism from the LEGO 42083 Bugatti Veyron set, modifying it to perform 6 steps per full rotation rather than 4. The stepper served as a base on which I installed a drum built around the 6-sided Technic rotor plate piece. That created enough room for 6 small “boxes” with 5 sides each, so each of them could have different floor, ceiling and walls, and enough room for two minifigures inside. The whole thing was rotated 1/6th of full rotation at the press of a button. It crossed my mind that it might be cool to make the button look and work like a camera shutter release button, but I was running short on time and frankly, my hopes at winning weren’t great due to the sheer amount of other submissions (over 600).
The scenes dealt with cycle of parenthood in a father-daughter relationship. They start with a young man becoming a father in a hospital room, then there’s a dad playing with daughter on a swing, a dad attending his daughter’s graduation ceremony, an elderly father attending his daughter’s wedding, a dad visiting an accomplished (and pregnant) daughter at work, and finally the daughter welcoming her own child in a scene that mirrors the first scene and also implies that the her own father is gone at this point.
I put quite a lot of work into the minifigures and the details of each scene. The dad was quite a challenge, as he had to visibly age by some 50-ish years, step by step. I found the daughter easier to work with, as I basically had to use a baby, a child, and then a woman going from early adulthood onwards. The details in the scenes, while small, called for a lot of work – for instance, the first and last scene feature similar hospital room but with considerable amount of time passing between, so I’ve tried to make the latter scene look observably more futuristic (e.g. changing the look of the clock present in both scenes). It was also my goal to have distinctly different floor in each scene, and many scenes included additional structure, such as a partial tree and foliage, or a scene with simplified representation of an audience behind it.
The submission didn’t win anything, but it was an interesting, unique build for me, and the subject proved unexpectedly emotional and thought-provoking to me.
