The creative possibilities are endless with Lego, yet when a Morwell child picked up the little coloured bricks, he looked no further than his hometown for inspiration.
Nine-year-old Kaiden Gawley’s stop-motion video about Hazelwood Power Station reveals not only the hard work of a few hours in the school holidays, but also the pervasive effect of the closure on all age groups in the community.
In the YouTube video, pen-drawn flames of the 2014 mine fire erupt, Lego men waddle into Centrelink in droves and bills pile up threateningly.
Kaiden’s mum, Kirsty Harper, said the station closure had been a hot topic at school, then when her son said he wanted to make a YouTube video they started brainstorming ideas.
“The newspaper was actually sitting up on the bench and it had ‘Hazelwood, a year on’ that day, so that was … an inspiration,” Ms Harper said.
The video also features Kaiden’s ‘pop’, Russell Harper, who once drove dump trucks at Hazelwood, however, left long before it closed.
Ms Harper said her son was Lego-obsessed and the video combined his interests in both the toys and current affairs, despite him telling the Express its newspaper was boring.
“He generally does sit down and read the paper and watch the news … he likes to know what’s going on,” she said.
“He’d been reading about Hazelwood a fair bit and he’d been asking questions so he got on Google and had a look at it.”
“He enjoyed doing it because he wanted … for people to relate to it.”
Kaiden’s mum helped him with the video, keeping the camera still and prompting him when things needed a bit more work, such as suggesting cotton buds for chimneys.
His next creative project will be a video about the paper mill.
Watch the video online via youtube.com/watch?v=i901gI9jw7Q.
