You might say that it’s exo-lent
Something is happening in outer space…
Peter Reid’s Exo Suit is the latest release from the website-formerly-known-as-Cuusoo, LEGO Ideas. To announce the impending arrival of this set, TLG put out the above CG animated video, “co-created” (whatever that means) by Chris Salt of Oblong Pictures. I think having promotional videos for upcoming LEGO Ideas sets is a great concept on TLG’s part, but as with so many of their releases, this one suffers from being about twice as long as it needed to be.
Oddly, I don’t think the running time would have stuck out to me as much if the video had been done with stop-motion. As much as I’d love to see the real Exo Suit kit get animated (and I’m sure we will), it is a fragile-looking design. TLG tends to use CG when there are clear advantages to having a weightless wire-frame model, and that makes sense here from a production standpoint.
Except… none of those advantages are really utilized, and there’s large swaths of time where we’re basically looking at a video of a still image. It’s neat that the characters adhere to real-world minifig limitations (the influence of The LEGO Movie continues to be felt), but there is just SO MUCH DEAD TIME in this piece that it makes me wonder why they bothered making an animated video at all. When Exo Suit pilot Yve punches the keypad at 2:00, and the door starts whirring open with all the quickness of an inebriated turtle, I literally yelled at my computer screen for it to hurry up.
Anyway, I can certainly appreciate the effort that goes into making an animated video of any kind; this one just didn’t do it for me. Despite the less than stellar (space pun) execution, I’m hoping that promo videos for LEGO Ideas sets become something we see more of in the future. At the very least, it did get me excited about the set itself.