Oslo Opera House Model

I got call from ArtOrg the other day and they needed an animation for a video project they were working on. They wanted to use Legos to display a quilt on the Oslo Opera House. So... I needed to make a model of the Oslo Opera House for the short.

As you can see the building is very angular. I decided to use rigid foam insulation because of the many flat surfaces and sharp corners. The insulation is easy to cut and surprisingly strong.

I started by cutting out the basic shapes using a diagram of the roof and used duct tape to secure the pieces together. 

It all came together much easier than I could have imagined. Once the pieces were cut out I was able to prop them up and "magic whooshing sound" Opera House.

The one drawback to using rigid insulation is that you cannot use spray paint to paint it. The chemical propellent will melt the surface of the insulation. But... if you do it right you can get some cool stone like effects. I started by priming the model with regular water based house paint primer. I used a 2" wide brush the paint on the primer and left plenty of pink steaks on the model. I then add a coat of white spray paint.

The spray paint melted the insulation that shown through the primer. I then used some granite textured spray paint to give the unmelted surfaces a little more texture.

And then, I got a little carried away with the spray paint and melted more of the model than I wanted. So I used some spackle to fill in the larger holes that I had melted with the paint. The upside to this was that the spackle smoothed out some of the seams created by the duct tape.

I used latex house paint for the final layer. This will help keep the spackle from flaking off and it doesn't look too bad either.

For the windows I just used plexiglass. It's easy to cut and very few people can actually tell the difference. The supports were made from left over bits of rigid insulation.

Here is the finished model with Legos. We used Micro Figs so the scale would be more accurate.

I used flour to simulate snow which looked great, but turned out to be very difficult to work with when animating. It tends to stick to everything it touches, including my camera.

Here's a link to the finished animation.

Childrens Gift to Norway