YORK COUNTY, Pa. — Logan Zabarkes is your average 14-year-old boy.
He collects LEGO, likes history, and has a passion for filmmaking.
One day at school, his social studies teacher mentioned a competition and encouraged Zabarkes to enter.
“One morning [he] told us there’s this presidential competition going on where you can make a one-minute video about a president and he showed us what some of the videos were and he was like ‘You guys could totally do this.’ And I love making movies, so I thought why not give it a shot,” Zabarkes recalled.
That competition is Project POTUS, a middle school history initiative from a non-profit in Indianapolis, Indiana called Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site.
After picking Harry S. Truman as his president, Zabarkes knew there was only one way he wanted to tell his story.
“With LEGO, you can just create flying superheroes or laser beams shooting out of hands that I can’t do in real life,” Zabarkes said.
He has bins and bins full of colorful bricks that he used to make set pieces.
Zabarkes also used pieces from three LEGO figures to make Truman, each one representing a different stage of his life.
“When most people see a LEGO figure, they might not think that’s the most articulate toy, so how could someone use a figure like this to make a full animated movie?
The answer... stop motion animation.
“For stop motion, you set up your camera and then you have your set and your little character, you take a picture, and then you move your character just a little bit, and you take another picture and then you move them again just a little bit. Eventually, when you put it all together, it’ll look decently smooth and like a movie,” Zabarkes explained.
More than a thousand pictures later, he submitted his project to a panel of judges.
After months of narrowing down more than 300 entries, Zabarkes got the results.
“I saw it in an email and went running downstairs like ‘Mom, Dad, I won! Look at me go.’ I was really happy.”
The news of his victory spread quickly.
“My social studies teacher sent the video to the entire school district, and I started getting a lot of people that I didn’t really know well like ‘Hey your video is awesome, good job,’ and it made me feel really happy,” Zabarkes said.
Zabarkes received a $500 prize and is expected to invest some of it in future projects.
He also plans to take filmmaking classes after he completes his freshman year of high school.