A 12-year-old student has created a Lego animation based on the George Michael mural in Kingsbury.
Nikhil Patel was inspired by Dawn Mellor’s mural to the late Wham! star who lived and went to school until his early teens in the Kingsbury area.
The video animation, which has been viewed nearly a thousand times, shows mini Lego figures of the artist Ms Mellor launching her mural followed by George Michael dancing in his police outfit from his ‘Outside’ music video.
Nikhil said: “I thought that if I did a George Michael animation, I could bring him back to life in a way within my Lego town and make people smile again.”
Lego animation is a long process which requires storyboarding, model-making, test shots, filming and editing.
The Kingsbury High School pupil said the George Michael piece took over a month to film in his spare time around school and homework.
He started doing a few small animations last Christmas but took advantage of the first lockdown and began developing bigger projects.
His YouTube channel NNP Lego Animations now has 14 Lego stop-motion animations, including a Diwali celebration and a Covid-19 Government briefing.
“I always try to make them better and learn from my previous animations,” he said.
Through creating and filming animations like the Diwali video Nikhil remarked he felt more aware of different cultures and religions.
His father, Neel Patel, believes it teaches him to look towards the future and work to a timeline as the animations need to be completed in time for the event.
Nikhil currently has three projects lined up and he takes inspiration from some of his favourite stop-motion movies like Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit and has aspirations of becoming an animator when he is older.
He hopes in the future he can teach the rest of his school how to do animation and wishes to inspire any other aspiring animators.
“Just get something simple and start making these types of animations and maybe also start a YouTube channel like I did if they want to take it forward,” said Nikhil.
“But the most important bit is to have fun with the animations, because Lego is supposed to be fun.
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