This is an articulated puppet of a creepy demon Shrek that I’ve used in a quick stop-motion LEGO animation called “Shrek Eats 2,000 Chicken Nuggets.” I came up with the idea for this when I was on the train ride home from work and feeling hungry, and joked to myself that I could eat 2,000 chicken nuggets. Whilst I had that thought, I stumbled upon a funny reference to Shrek on Reddit on my phone, so my brain combined both and came up with the concept for this video.

I first started with building Shrek’s head, and the main obstacle was using Technic connectors to allow reciprocating friction in Shrek’s mouth movements. I then created the torso and eventually the claw fingers.

In my video, the closeups of the claws grabbing the nuggets were recorded first. Then I shot the main footage of the talking, reaction shots, and laughing. The final shots were the takes of him chewing on the nuggets. Each of those shots reused the same nugget in his claws – and then reused the same chopped-up chicken nugget pieces in his mouth – thus minimizing the amount of chicken nuggets wasted.

For each shot of Shrek opening his mouth, I’d slide in little lime green LEGO wedges in the sides of his mouth; these wedges were of varying sizes, depending on how wide open his mouth was to be. This was a very tedious process, as my standard LEGO puppets could easily open/close their mouths like regular puppets (such as Link). Also, I’d manually remove and swap out different eyes depending on his expression.

Editing the footage was rather straightforward, but the difficult task was recording all of the audio and doing the music. In fact, after the final cut was done, I spent a whole night working on the cover of “Back Door Man” in FL Studio.