A very short movie called “Attack of the Killer Legos” shows that the building blocks of a future film career are already in place for 14-year-old Carlos Key of Seattle.
Key’s film won the youth category in the Seattle International Film Festival’s “3 Minute Masterpiece” digital film contest and employs a combination of cinematic techniques including stop-motion animation and forced perspective to create what Key refers to as a “grindhouse trailer.”
A student at The Evergreen School in Shoreline, Wa., Key created “Attack” in two days during a mid-term “Adventure Day” program where students are allowed to come up with their own two-day curriculum centered around a personal passion. The teen wrote, directed, animated and did the visual effects for his project in January.
Carlos’ father is Forest Key, founder of the Seattle virtual reality video processing startup Pixvana.
“The fact that a film like this can be assembled in two days (including late night at home working on the effects shots) is amazing to me as a former visual effects professional,” Key said in an email to GeekWire. “In 1994 when i worked at Industrial Light and Magic on films like “Star Wars,” “Mission Impossible,” and “Men in Black,” the tools to do the kind of work Carlos and other teens can now have at their disposal through their schools, would have cost literally, $1 million, and taken weeks to produce.”
A lover of film, Carlos spends a lot of his time studying production techniques and making films for his YouTube channel. His appreciation for filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is clear, but one of his films details a condition which personally affects him called Anosmia (no sense of smell). It won first place in a student science project competition.
“Attack of the Killer Legos” will screen at the SIFF Cinema Uptown on Lower Queen Anne on Saturday at 10 a.m. Forest Key said that his son is bummed to be missing the showing because he’s in Peru on a class trip where he is, of course, shooting a documentary of the adventure.
