Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
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I'm looking for some nice tungsten light bulbs that don't put out a orange yellowish color for desk lamps. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Tungsten light bulbs have an inherently orangeish color to the light they cast. You can get incandescent bulbs that attempt to correct for this, essentially by tinting the glass blue, like this sort of thing, or halogens that are incandescent but have a cooler color. But at that point I feel you're losing some of the purity of the light. For a brickfilm, I think you'd get better results by white balancing for the warmer incandescent bulb, or switching to fluorescent bulbs (which, admittedly, don't provide color reproduction as pure as tungsten bulbs, though for reference they have been the primary light source in just about every brickfilm I've ever made).
Do you think LED light bulbs would work for brick films?
I use LED light bulbs. For me, they work fine. Most all of my films have been made using my LEDs, and the only light flicker I have noticed is from not having my camera in fully auto.
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Another benefit of LEDs is that they don't get very hot. Like, I have grabbed them after an hour or so of being on, and the plastic is slightly warm. (the back part gets reasonably hot, but not the lighting up part). A nice benefit of this is that you can place the light almost directly against the LEGO bricks without fear of melting anything.
Last edited by Rivvm m (January 26, 2016 (04:31pm))
The only issue with cheep LEDs (and florescent bulbs for that mater) besides a hight speed flicker is a low CRI (color rendering index) due to the limited color pallet of LEGO bricks and the absence of skin that shouldn't be and issue. If you have problems with flicker just keep the your shutter speed below 1/60 sec (1/50 in European countries) and/or a direct multiple of that; 1/30, 1/15, etc... (1/25, 1/12,...) and you should be fine. IMHO slower shutter speeds are better when possible, because they reduce the effects of mechanical error
This is why I like fluorescent bulbs; you don't have to worry about the shutter speed flicker issue that LEDs can present. They have CRI problems like cheap LEDs, but they don't have the flicker problems. And as Mark said, low CRI is generally less of a problem with LEGO. Ultimately any of these lights can produce a good result with a bit of finessing.
I use 100w soft white incandescent bulbs that have been banned years ago, but I have enough of them to illuminate my entire home for 30 years. My sets look so much more vivid with my new ("new" meaning most recent) camera set to incandescent than they did with my old camera.
Just tested the GE and CREE light bulbs in my room by filming them at different shutter speeds up to 1/10000 of a second and was not able to produce any noticeable flicker. 
The same can not be said for LED christmas lights, some light strips, and some flashlight, especially at less than full power, these often produce a flicker that is easily visible even by the human eye. This has to do with cheep driver circuitry.
I use mostly LEDs for lighting my films, because I didn't want to have to worry about bulbs burning out, and I like that they don't heat up. Interestingly, my flicker problem seems to have completely disappeared when I switched. Not sure why, but I wouldn't worry about flicker with LED bulbs, as long as they aren't super cheap.
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