I have a certain procedure to building sets.  Whenever I do exterior sets, I have a green platform in the back supported by columns.  I then put a load of great slopes as a rock face leading up to the top of the platform.
The platform on the edge is really great for disguising the fact that you can't really properly do a horizon because building that far would be ridiculous.

A well good set you say? Many things can fit those needs; If I wanted to make a woodland area, I populate it with various things that are related to the environent. I'll be honest, when I started animating, or brickfilming say, I used minimal set design, as I thought it was more about the animation than the set design, boy was I wrong. All I can say to you is to try and fill the set with interesting little details, that may catch the viewers attention-which I need to obviously need to work on.

Years ago I made a series of video tutorials for brickfilming, some of which focuses on set building. You can watch them here.

Even though the videos are old, I think everything I say still applies.

Other thoughts:

• Keep an eye on what other LEGO fans are building. The blog Brothers-Brick.com is good.

• Make sure the set matches the mood of your film. Is the scene happy or jovial? Use bright colors. If it's sad mood, gravitate toward grays and whites.

• Avoid using too many primary colors unless the film is intentionally mimicking the look of a cartoon. I prefer using tan or other earthtone colors for my sets, though bright colors can work really well for some people's styles, like Squid.

• Always give yourself enough room to manipulate characters and props inside the set. If you make the set too small or too detailed, you'll find yourself causing set and prop bumps way too often.

YouTube | Twitter | Brickfilm Archival Project
Brickfilms Wiki | BiM: The Documentary

The trick to bright colours is the correct presentation using grey.  Bright red walls are really crazy and a little bit painful visually.  The same goes for any really bright colour.

My Leprechauns in France set may be a bit of an explosion of bright colours, but I think it works very well because there is a great big wall of grey rocks which kinda balances it out.

Another technique I use for set building is the four walled arena type set:

There are certain situations where you have a particularly long scene with a relatively large number of different camera angles.  For this sort of scene, one cannot use a simple sitcom type setup with a missing fourth wall.  So you need to build separate walls which do not interlink with each other so as each can be easily removed to take in the action from basically any angle you want (unless it points at the ceiling).

The minimum number of walls you will need to build for this is two, such as in my picture above.  Though the room really has four walls, each opposite wall looks exactly the same on the opposite side of the room, so they can be switched out.
For the lair in Odoriferous, I had to build three walls because two of the four walls were unique, the entrance wall, and the back wall.  The side walls were both the same, though, so I only needed one of those which I could switch out from side to side depending upon the angle.

For I Am The Night, I filmed a scene last year where I went against Nathan's only build what the camera sees rule by building an opening to the street and a building on the other side of that street.

It was my original belief that it would probably be seen during the fight scene, however, the way the fight scene went that never actually happened.  But I don't mind much, I like being prepared, and I did have enough bricks.
I have a liking for not planning out stuff perfectly because I enjoy thinking up some certain details as I go along.  My plans are usually relatively rough when it comes to the exact situation for fights and camera position and such, so I like to prepare myself for whatever I might want to do.

For instance, just this morning I animated a minifigure talking sideways.  And even though I have been planning this specific film for over two years, I was never at any point until today cognizant of the fact that would be animating him sideways.

Now for this shot in Sharks and Clowns, though, I did actually build only what the camera saw whilst the camera was actually pointed at it.  But it was a completely isolated shot, so I could actually do that.

This is a good thread!

I was having this question with myself due to the minimal amount of bricks to build a decent enviroment! Although one trick I learned was to put black in the background so you don't let "reality seep in".

Cybercom, I also use the BASEPLATE from this set to sometimes make sky:
http://holding-our-own.tumblr.com/post/ … peeron-com

Are you talking about the scifi set I used in Sneeuwpop in the first picture?

That set is built from light grey bricks.  I use some daylight blue bulbs which are closer to neutral than those nasty warm bulbs usually are, but slightly on the cool side of things.  I did not colour correct enough to completely compensate for the cool hue because I feel it complements the blue details on the walls.

Whatever your sky backdrop is, it should be something really, really big, just in case you want to do more wide shots.  I use a canvas painted sky blue.