Storytelling for sure. SO many brickfilms with mindless violence and fart jokes. I've done it, but mostly just to attract viewers. There is not many brickfilms highlighting girls, unless they are the damsels in distress in superhero brickfilms.
Comedy and action seem to be to two most popular genres when it comes to brickfilms.

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I think those are the most popular genres because are the two easiest things to convey to most. I mean, horror and dramatic brickfilms can be harder to pull off (at least for me).

My biggest problem with having female characters is finding female voice actresses, but there are a few around here occasionally. I have nothing against female characters, but there are just way more male voice actors around.

Several things,
One being that we lean less on fancy lighting, big detailed sets and flashy effects to make our films good, and look back to the core issues of storytelling, pacing, and character development. I've seen a lot of comments that say "Great animation and effects, but why did X happen/Why did X do that/why didn't you spend more time explaining X?" And it seems that we sometimes race to make the technical aspects great, but forget those things that can't be immediately seen on-screen. (Myself included!) Not that those are bad, but we must remember that those are like the toppings on ice cream. There are great, can add a lot, and are easily seen (being on top level) but that we need a good foundation or all that is just fluff.

Yes, we don't see many female driven shorts, but that's probably because we don't have many female voice actors, it's a male dominated hobby, and we just don't stop to think about such things. Could we change the male to female ratio a bit? Sure. But there are several things that just don't make that quite as easy as some may think.

As to genres, yeah, there's a lot of light comedies, and seemingly less serious and dramatic films than of times past.
We've got a lot of mindless action films, but a bit of a search can still yield some good, deeper films nowadays. Not as many as we'd probably like, but that could change.

I think another thing missing is the longer runtimes. It seems that most films now are about five minutes or less. There's nothing wrong with that, but it'd be nice to see increased numbers of longer, more involved and developed, films.

Storytelling, characters, themes. Brickfilmers should know that they don't have to follow a formula. LEGO emphasizes freedom and creativity. So let your mind wander. No need to follow everyone else.

If you really wanna make a Star Wars brickfilm, then make it. But be sure it's the best thing you could create. People think the medium is oversaturated with dumb, pointless franchise videos--what'll make your video not dumb?

I agree that the most deficient part of brickfilming is the writing.  When a ell-written brickfilm comes around, everyone takes notice.  If you watch my own comedy series, my technical aspects are not the best, but I strive in my writing to make something that will inspire lego animators who view them to write solid, quality material.

And since it's come up, the lack of female voices is a problem that we should address.  I've found other resources outside the brickfilm community to find female vocals and new semi-regular characters who are appearing in future episodes.  I don't know how much responsibility it is on our part to recruit females to brickfilming, but I'd like to see more, and with the proliferation of Lego Friends, one would expect to see an increase in girls making lego cartoons.

Dyland, I need to find more female roles.  Is scar heart active here?  I think I remembered her from a year ago.

See this isn't a problem for me, as I have pretty much any female character I need sorted. My mother's a professional voice over artist.

That said, I don't think gender ratios are actually that important; it's quality. Forgetting the movies, if you read The Lord of the Rings there are very few active female characters, but that doesn't matter. We get Eowyn, who starts off as a mere shield maiden and ends up stabbing pure, unadulterated, physical evil in the face where men and even kings fail. Throwing in additional female characters is unnecessary if you have one that really stands out. And if you read Y: The Last Man, it's the opposite: there's only one male character. Everyone else is female, as that's the premise of the series. It becomes deeply interesting watching a man wander an all-female world. So in summary, it's not about the gender ratio in itself, but about how it corresponds to the story in question. Game of Thrones gets it marvellously right, while the Star Wars expanded canon often takes it too far and exploits its largely male readership. It ultimately comes down to good writing.

I think storytelling is important, but it depends on what you as the brickfilmer are setting out to do. If you're setting out to hone your skills as an animator, before putting the time into creating a larger and more demanding project, then I can understand seeing a test montage or a fight sequence appear in my subscription feed. If you're setting out to do that larger and more demanding project, then storytelling becomes essential.

That said, I think a lot of newer brickfilmers get lost in the former. It's so easy just to animate a guy walking forwards, or to do a series of unrelated clips, and keep doing that while you try to come up with a good idea for a story, but if you want to develop your skills, you should challenge yourself and push to invent something. As has been said before, that can be true of licensed IP brickfilms as much as it is for original ones, and I do think this is an area where a lot of brickfilmers can improve.

In order to try to do that, I set myself a challenge last year. Every time I bought one of the collectible minifigures, I had to come up with a brickfilm for it (not necessarily make it, but work out a story at least). That's actually how La Conquista came about - I got the Conquistador, and started thinking of stories for him. The first thing I came up with was what might happen if he discovered he hadn't explored part of south America first, and I'd just been on holiday to Iceland and learned all about Leif Erikson, hence the vikings. To be honest, I'm pretty happy that I did go for as wacky a brickfilm as that was, and I think a lot of people miss out on the rewarding feeling you get after creating something that truly has your own individual stamp on it.

In terms of genre, I'd love to see people branch out a bit more. When I first started brickfilming, it was all about two-guys-in-a-flat, and while brickfilmers like Nathan and MindGame produced some excellent brickfilms, it was a phase. There was then a brief classic space phase, an ongoing superhero trend, and a medieval phase. What I'd really like to see is more original fantasy. While the medieval stuff is good, I'd love it if people tried more urban fantasy or a bit of Greek or Japanese myth. There's a lot more material than dwarves and goblins if you look a bit further - there are Russian frog-men, gold-eating phoenixes, zombie dragons, werepires and oceans made out of milk - and I'd love to see what people could come up with if they put their minds to it

Also, the most iconic stop-motion films of all time are monster movies, primarily those of Ray Harryhausen. Stuff like the satyroid cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad really sticks in your mind, and it'd be nice to see more brickfilmers try monster animation. With the Mixel ball-and-socket joints, this has become even more accessible, and is something I personally plan to explore in the fall (assuming I can brickfilm at university). Basically, more non-minifigure animation would be welcome in my eyes.

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I don't feel that like we can say the genre of brickfilms as a whole needs to expands, a lot of genres are easier to make as a brickfilm then as a live action, try making a sci-fi or super hero movie in live action, it's going to be a lot harder then using LEGO. If you don't like that I'm making sci-fi films that don't take them selves seriously, or that other people are making super hero or Starwars film that's not a problem with brickfilming, it's a problem with you

For me the what I really need to work on is character development. None of the films I have written have any characters for all intents and purposes. The casting call I sent out for my current project looked like this:

All the parts are about as deep and nuanced as you would expect from there names. While there isn't any character development in the script I still feel like it was my strongest script, mostly because I think I overcame the last hurdler that was challenging me: anti-climatic endings. I first realized it was a problem  when someone gave me some feedback on Attack of the Evil Robotic Turkey From Outer Space, I think it may have been RevMan, but the complaint was: "Not enough evil robotic turkey rampage, and a disappointing final battle." [Both very true, it's one of my worst films] I feel like it's taken me some time to over come this, and hopefully 4 or so films later I can finally have something that has a satisfying ending.

Now my next project will have to work on character development, and I think to get any real kind of development the length of my movies is going to have to increase a bit, just so the characters have room to breath and the audience has time to learn who they are. If I could make a script that was half as good as Bee and Puppycat I would be SO HAPPY! The first five minuets of that is used just setting Bee up as a believable character and by the time she and Puppycat ever fish bowl space you really know who she is. Little details like the awkward relationship she has with her neighbor, her vices, and all of that is explained just by showing how she interacts with the world. The next five minuets you start to learn about Puppycan, they didn't try to cram all of his/her character in the same space that you were leaning about Bee. These are all things I need to think about when I turn my next idea into a script, how fast to create a character, how many can I have in a given length of time and so on.

I think if you want to talk about brickfilming on a broader scale, we could use better teamwork, we have a lot of different filmmakers that are good at different things and if more of them could work together and get people who were good a writing scripts, or even just proofing scripts and refining ideas we could see more large scale projects. The fact that I am working by my self after doing most of my older projects with one other animator/composer has made it harder for me to motivate myself to work quickly, and even if I was just as motivated as I was working as a team it would still take twice as long for me to make a film.

and to touch on the gender equality issue, the best way to deal with that is own good recording equipment and ask women you know to do voice work for you. You don't need to be good friends with them, you just need to know them well enough that they don't think you're creepy. You might be surprised at who says yes, the worst they can do is say no. If you act professional I don't think they will think it's weird, they might get excited about the project. Have printed copies of the script with proper formatting, have a mic stand and a pop filter, they will feel like they are getting involved in your art (which they are) and they will feel a bit like a star. It's always nice to supply some food, they are helping you out after all, the least you can do is pay for a meal for them during the voice acting session.

I personally don't like to get voice actors online because if you can have two actors in the same room you have more flexibility with the dialog, which sometimes just sounds unnatural when you end up hearing it out loud, but sometimes that can't be helped, and not everyone can afford good recording equipment.

Several people have brought up the fact that "modern brickfilms don't have very good stories," and, though I don't want to argue, I don't think that that is really an "area of improvement" that the brickfilming community as a whole can improve on. - Only can individual storytellers and filmmakers do this.

I've written a pretty good (If I do say so myself) brickfilm based on Johnny Thunder and the Adventurers. However, this script is 30 pages long, and thus, the final film will be at least 30 minutes in itself, not taking into consideration how long it will take to build the sets, animate and film, edit, master, and upload my brickfilm. - The extra time it takes me to do this may be because of perfectionism, or due to the fact that I strive for better animation, and less lighting flicker. But, I think that, in the film's relation to the case of this discussion, good stories take a long time. - That time, many brickfilmers either don't have. (Or, they're making the time... but, it'll be weeks, months, or even years before their film is finally put out there)

I could complain in the same vein about how bad writers are saturating the market right now (i.e. Twilight, Twilight, Twilight, etc.) but I won't, because I know that there are still great writers out there (Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, etc.). However, when was the last time King or Rowling published a book? (aside from King's recent publication) I can't think of ANY within the last 3 years. Does that make them bad at their craft, no. But, it does go to show that in a business where fame and fortune is really about timing, not quality; crap does get through. Such as the case of brickfilms.

I once thought the same way, and disregarded most brickfilms made since 2010. However, once I came upon Pritchard's "Steampunk," Nathan Well's Comeback "Alex and Derrek: 5 Years Later," and several others, I realized that the problem wasn't that there are more bad brickfilms made today, but rather, that the bad brickfilms that were made years ago aren't as well known/have been deleted.

In another 4 years, I bet I'll come across some discussions on how there are no good brickfilms since 2014, and, I'll know that they're wrong.

Again, this all wraps up with what I started with: It's not the community, or even the films that are to blame. It is the storytellers and filmmakers who are to blame.

We should make a list of "bad" things at the top of this thread and each of us promise to "fix" at least one issue in their next brick film.  By increments we can be the fixer of the collective problem.