By Brandon Buck
As each year comes to a close, we at The Pollack Group enjoy creating a little video to send our holiday wishes. We’ve made a snow globe or two, some snowflakes, some cookies, and even a special cocktail.
But 2025 is special—it marks our 40th anniversary. While we’re excited about the plans we have for the year ahead, this milestone also has us reflecting on our roots and what the world looked like back in 1985. One nostalgic item that many homes featured back then? Lite Brites.
The Pollack Group logo is an excellent icon because it’s simple and unique. So, recreating it with Lite Brite pegs? Easy, right? Just draw out the Lite Brite layout in Adobe After Effects, blow up the icon to a full size of paper, and trace it out on a window. Piece of cake.
Except what if there aren’t enough red pegs? What if there aren’t enough of any pegs? Well, let’s count what we have: 34 pegs of 6 colors each. The extra challenge is we don’t depict our logo in colors other than red, black, or white, let alone 6 different hues. So what now?
Assuming the final video will depict the icon as a single-tone of red, this means that we can essentially shoot in black and white, and make the final video “red” (which makes sense – Lite Brites are their own illumination source, so if all pegs were one color, there would only be one color in the whole room).
So if we see what all of the pegs look like in black and white, we notice something interesting: whites and yellows look identical, and greens, oranges, and reds have the same slightly darker tone. Blues are the only colors that stand out from the rest. Now we have 170 pegs to work with, especially if we use the darker pegs closer to the edges and lighter pegs in the center.
Now, let’s redraw that map of how we’ll place these together.
For this video, we utilized the Venus Optics 24mm T8 Pro2be Direct View Probe lens because we wanted to get really close to the light pegs and film some interesting shots. Initially we thought we would need a dark room, and the shoot would be difficult to navigate, but the fact that the Venus Optics lens has a maximum aperture of f/8 meant that dim room lights weren’t going to be an issue, especially when the subject we’re exposing for is a light source itself.
After capturing several live-action shots, the best way to execute a timelapse build of the logo is to assemble the Lite Brite first and then photograph each peg being removed individually. 156 photographs later, and we have an animated Lite Brite build (with some slight camera movement to make it feel like a sunflower opening up and really highlighting the build).
