With one or two notable exceptions (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and a few others) dialogue-free films with any kind of plot at all very quickly become mime melodrama. It's difficult for me to look at some films from the silent era without either getting exasperated or seeing humour in all the wrong places.

But wordy expositions are equally annoying, as is leaden dialogue between two or more participants with no interesting visuals. So "Show, don't tell" is a good motto to have in front of you while you are making films, especially brickfilms, where nuances of expression are not possible. My favourite brickfilm is "Droits d'Auteur/or Copyright" which has a great mixture of action, dialogue and humour, with an interesting plot. Difficult to see that working without sound.

Last edited by jahnocli (July 28, 2014 (10:02am))

Some thoughts on dialog and Quentin Tarantino, Tarantino is a writer who is very good and what he does, but he understands that film is a visual medium whereas a director like Kevin Smith who is a good writer but just points his camera at his actors almost as if it's an afterthought. Words cannot describe how much I hate Kevin Smith, he creates radio plays and accidentally leaves a video camera running as his actors go through there lines, whereas Tarantino's dialog is accompanied be excellent camera work and editing.

If you use dialog they need to be used as a way to support the visual aspects of the film, they should not be used to fully carry the project. When I do a voice acting session, what I find is I end up cutting out a lot of unnecessary dialog, when you are writing out a project you often find that you write in things that describe the scene which should untimely be shown, but once you start saying them out-loud those sort of things become obvious choices for cutting.

This is why I prefer to do voice acting sessions with my actors, when you hear to people talking to each other the words that might be used descriptively in a writing context cease to make sense, if you don't have the luxury of directing your voice actors you could probably get around this by recording temporary voices, ideally with you and a friend, before you send your lines to your voice actors. Your script might say, "Bob, look at this book I found" but as you speak to your friend you might find that just saying, "Look at this!" or even "Look!" have a better flow then all the unnecessary verbiage. And I know a lot of folks are pretty conservative about strong language  but sometimes you can take a longish sentence and convey it's entire meaning with more impact by using one well placed expletive.

Using less dialog is an art, and that's why many of the early silent films are harder for some people to watch, many of the other early directors did not have the visual vocabulary of the legends like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. But if you look at films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, There Will Be Blood,  Wall-E or UP you can see that visual storytelling can still be used to great effect.

This is a topic that I think about a lot, since my own series is very dialogue heavy.

My 3 favorite Brickfilm series span the full spectrum: joe Brickmond, Nightly News At nine, the films of Michael Hickox (sp?).  Joe Brickmond is a dialogue-heavy series, and much of the humor and drama develop out of it.  It's still highly visually interesting and entertaining e ven if you're not hearing the audio.

On the completely other side of the spectrum are the ?Michael Hickox films.  The dialogue is very sparse, which causes the director to rely mostly on visuals, and also close focus on comedic timing.  His films do so well and almost elevate the artistic level of Lego animation.

In the middle is Nightly News at nine.  A very funny series but action packed.  The level and detail of animation is almost dizzying, yet there is a lot of dialogue and dialogue-based humor.  Though I hate the term, becuase it's almost never true literally, it's a "must-watch" series.

My own series is focused on writing, and much of the humor is dialogue-based.  I take a much different approach because I try to pattern a typical sitcom as closely as possible.  This means that there are a lot of rudimentary scenes without a lot of visual action.  A funny concept came about when my brother and I were joking around in the early 1990s, when Rush Limbaugh had a television program.  My brother said that Rush could come out with a cartoon, which would be exactly like his TV show, only animated.  It was funny to us because the show was mainly him sitting at his desk talking, with a bunch of books and a sailboat on a shelf behind him, or showing a clip of a politician saying something dumb.  Anyway, I think about that joke a lot, because I know that watching a sitcom is one thing, but watching a group of Lego people talking for 20 minutes in one room is another.  I try to keep my work visually interesting by changing the camera views a lot, something I've increased in the episode in progress.

Each type of film: visual, talkative, and in-between, has its own benefits, weaknesses, and animation challenges.