A bit back Jim Southworth and I spoke about his experiences as Silicon Dreams Studio’s lead animator. He revealed loads of details including cut content, developer memories, and shared several videos relating to his animation work.
To start off with, I asked him about he got involved with the development of LEGO Island 2:
I think we started in 1999. It was a long time ago! There were two of us animating. I’d been working at Silicon Dreams since 1995.
Secondly, I asked him about his favorite development memories related to the development:
It was the early days of 3D video games, so it was a fun challenge to bring minifigs to life. At that time here hadn’t been a gazillion Lego games or movies.
-We really enjoyed animating the Brickbots and sending them to Lego for approval.
-I though the audio team did an amazing job adding spot effects to my cartoony animations.
-We used to laugh at the VO. It was pretty cringey – ‘The Dude with the Food’.
-The engine was written in house and we just couldn’t get the lighting right for some reason. We shipped with really harsh shadows that look really bad now.
Most intriguingly, the videos he shared revealed a lot of cut content I did not expect. There were video tests for pirates, a titanic-themed diving area, among other cut portions that previously we had no knowledge of being a part of Silicon Dreams’ design for LEGO Island 2:
Lastly, the next most interesting videos were toast.avi and swimintoshark.avi. In order to let you properly experience the videos I will not comment directly on them…:
When I questioned Jim about toast.avi he had this to say:
Just me messing around pushing how evil the Brickster could possibly be. A bit too far for a pre-teen audience I think.
BRICKOME 