Seven-year-old Dubai resident uses Lego to create incredible stop-motion videos in quarantine

Martin Nikolenko uses Lego characters and the stop-motion filming technique to create his clips

Martin Nikolenko is a 7-year-old Dubai resident with a penchant for making films with Lego. Courtesy Alexy Nikolenko

While some UAE residents spend quarantine perfecting their bread making skills and watching Netflix, a 7-year-old Dubai resident is showing people how it's done by producing incredible stop-motion movie clips using Lego pieces.

Kings School Al Barsha pupil Martin Nikolenko, 7, has put his abundance of time spent indoors to good use in recent days by creating mini movies with his father, Alexey Nikolenko.

And just as well as Martin has plenty of time on his hands, because his 50-second clip took him a whopping five hours to make.

The clip, first posted on his own Instagram page and then to Reddit, has drawn widespread praise from admirers.

The mini movies use Lego characters and the stop-motion filming technique, where the camera is repeatedly stopped and started as the subjects are moved and put into new positions, to give the impression of movement.

Martin's film is entitled "quarantine escape", and follows a Lego man's attempts to escape the family's house: first in a car, then up the family's stairs, then by drone and tow truck, until finally he parachutes from an upstairs window – only to fall achingly short of his final hurdle: the front gate.

"The idea of the series is to show several unsuccessful attempts of escaping the quarantine," father Alexey Nikolenko tells The National.

"The first episode took us around five hours from the first picture till the final version with music."

Russian expatriate Nikolenko has been living in Dubai since 2010 with his wife.

Martin has many hobbies (for instance, he has been snowboarding since he was 2), Nikolenko says, but unfortunately many were now not possible due to the movement restrictions in Dubai.

"Because of the quarantine, his hobbies are limited to music only, so we were trying to do something new," he says.

"It was his idea to build a parachute and then we decided to film it, which in the end turned into a movie. I was helping him with a camera, while Martin was basically 'directing; the film, moving the figures and creating the story."

Nikolenko says he hadn't considered uploading it to anywhere until seeing the final product and thinking "wow, we need to share this".

It would now become a series, showing the Lego character's pursuit in escaping quarantine; first via parachute and the second instalment was now being worked on.

"Martin is now very excited and we are working on the second episode. I don’t know, maybe we have the next Martin Scorsese, maybe he will lose interest soon, but for now it’s important for us that we have a lot of new things to do and those things are not boring at all."