Spite Your Face
Various

UK, 2001–04, video, 9 min 13 sec

ONE: A Space Odyssey, 2001, 1 min
Star Wars: The Han Solo Affair, 2002, 2 min 50 sec
Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego, 2004, 1 min 35 sec
Spiderman: The Peril of Doc Ock, 2004, 3 min 48 sec

Spite Your Face is Tony Mines and Tim Drage, founders of a London-based animation company responsible for producing a number of celebrated animated short films for major clients including Sony, Lego, Python Pictures and Lucasfilm. They have also directed TV commercials for international consumption and produced animation content for games and interactive toys.

Spite Your Face has to date produced seven animated ‘bricksploitation’ viral shorts. The works continue to top numerous net film charts, having been distributed widely across the internet as well as featuring on commercial DVDs, magazine cover disks, in broadcast and in print world-wide. ‘Behind the scenes’ articles about Spite Your Face films are available on its website. www.spiteyourface.com

ONE: A Space Odyssey was commissioned in 2001 from a script submitted for a film project celebrating Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film was produced using the traditional stop-motion animation process at a full 25 frames per second with still frames grabbed from a DV camcorder. The work, Spite Your Face’s fourth Lego film, is a comical parody of the original, condensing the highlights of Kubrick’s epic work into one minute. With this work, founders of Spite Your Face, Tony Mines and Tim Drage, secured the official backing of Lego, enabling subsequent films to become more and more elaborate.

Specific sections of films have been given the same comic Lego make-over in the other works: Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego recreates a musical scene of high camp at Camelot; Spiderman: The Peril of Doc Ock reanimates the battle between Spider-Man and Doc Ock from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, including the incredible fight scenes set on top of a moving New York train; and Star Wars: The Han Solo Affair is a reworking of a central scene from George Lucas’ Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, in which the film’s heroes attempt to rescue Han Solo.

The works all pay incredible attention to detail and utilise comic timing, specially commissioned sound, and a sense of the absurd to create mesmerising and entertaining short films.