Nowadays, folks are getting super fancy with their baby announcements. Gone are the days when people of old shouted from the town square when they were expecting a new bairn. So when we found out we were expecting, we wanted something that was us. I loved LEGOs as a kid…ah, who am I kidding? I still love LEGOs today! After a quick brainstorm, I put my two older offspring to work at building the house.  We ordered the LEGO baby from Amazon and used some of the minifig people parts from a Lego Town Set. To be honest, this just started as a tiny spark in my head and I went from there. I just grabbed whatever I had around to try and make it happen: 2 clamp lamps I used for home remodeling projects, and I picked up a cheap cellphone tripod.

This wasn’t our first baby, but it was my first ambitious baby announcement project for sure. It was also my first attempt at stop motion animation and I didn’t have a camera at the time. I took all of the pictures using a cellphone camera in one day and then it took me forever to edit the video. Firstly, because I was a few bricks short of a LEGO set when it came to experience in After Effects… And secondly, I didn’t have a green screen at the time so I pretty much had to mask out each frame. In fact, it took me so long to do that we thought we might be due before the project was finished.

Definitely not perfect, but my children loved it. And the best part is my children had no clue what we were doing. Somehow they never connected the dots to the 4 minifigs that look just like us…AND A BABY. I think they really just enjoyed playing with LEGOs. Can you blame them? In addition to the video itself, I’ve included some unedited images of the behind the scenes. I also recorded Karter and Kingslee’s priceless initial reaction to the baby announcement video. As you can see, even after the project was complete, they had no idea what was going on.