Bedtime stories in the Elan house would often feature vignettes of the Beis Hamikdash, and Shabbos afternoons in the Elan house would often feature Lego® building sessions. While both of those activities have been few and far in between as of late (it is hard to tell your kids bedtime stories when they go to sleep after you do), I have always thought about how those two hobbies could be combined. My solution was to build small dioramas of the Beis Hamikdash out of Lego® that showcase some classic scenes from the familiar tales.
The protagonist of our stories is Yonasan the Levi, a young boy who learns how to sing songs and play musical instruments for the avodah. While he has had many adventures over the years, the foundation of his fictional existence is how he accompanies the Memuneh (a Temple officer) on his daily rounds through the Beis Hamikdash early in the morning in what is, in essence, a stylized retelling of Tractate Tamid.
Bringing such an idea to life was, for me, fraught with challenges. In order to create Lego® dioramas one needs Lego® bricks, and while we do have a modest collection of those, there never seem to be enough of the right ones in the right colors. This can be easily remedied by funneling copious amounts of money into bulk brick purchases through such websites as bricklink.com, but I think you can figure out the problem here (hint: it starts with the word "copious"). Even if the bricks can be procured, finding the space to allot to them, and the time to build the models, and the cameras and lights and backdrops to photograph them, and know-how to use all that equipment, made the whole idea feel unattainable.
The modern era has provided a solution that alleviates almost all of the above concerns. It is called Bricklink Studio. This app allows the user to build with virtual Lego® bricks in unlimited amounts and in every official Lego® color. Furthermore, the app comes with its own photorealistic rendering engine that produces images of your creations that look convincingly like the real thing (like the image at the top of this post of Yonasan and the Memuneh).
A quick look through the user-generated image gallery reveals a wide assortment of Lego® models from people's imaginations that include whimsical oddities, beautiful scale models, massive buildings, and clever inventions. What I found while perusing all these pictures is that for all the variety in content, the presentation was disappointingly mundane. For the most part, each model is "photographed" from above and makes the subject look like a toy sitting upon a table. There are, however, special people in this world who have elevated Lego® photography to an art form, and the one example I am most familiar with is a man named Vesa Lehtimaki. He uses lighting, physical effects, and top-notch photography skills to tell compelling stories using Lego® models and you can see some of his work here. Inspired by his images, I set out to do something similar for my scenes of the Beis Hamikdash.
Although it is possible to create models in Studio and then export them to other 3D modeling programs where you can gain much finer control over parameters such as color, texture, and especially lighting, I decided to challenge myself to produce my images using only the built-in renderer of Studio. This means I only used official Lego® bricks, official Lego® colors, and the built-in lighting system. Calling it a lighting "system" is a bit generous, because there is only one default light and essentially the only parameter that you can control is its brightness. Or so I thought.
The magic really started when I turned the default light down to zero and added elements to the scene using luminous colors (yes, there are real bricks that do glow in the dark). Suddenly, torches started to glow and flames gave off light and the shots developed a rich and immersive atmosphere. I created spotlights using luminous white bricks, a sky glow using luminous soft blue baseplates, and lamps using warm luminous yellow 1x1 round plates. The lighting system was much more robust than I had imagined, and tremendous kudos to Studio for making it work so well!
I did bring the images into Photoshop to adjust levels and, in many cases, add tilt-shift for depth of field, but the overall look and feel comes right from Studio.
At this point I have prepared enough images to tell the basic story of the daily Tamid offering and I'm planning to post one each week. I hope that you enjoy viewing (and learning from) these mini scenes as much as I enjoyed creating them.
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Your enthusiasm is contagious! We look forward to your creative endeavors.
ReplyDeleteShalom! This is great and shows your creativity while sharing these important stories. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteLove it! Thank you for sharing!
ReplyDeleteAmazing and thank you for sharing!
ReplyDelete