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!
A place to discuss, share, and create stop motion films.
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I'm really looking forward to seeing this brickfilm! It looks so beautiful, and, I just love the idea. I hope it turns out great! 
I'm sort of wondering what idea your talking about, I haven't really divulged anything about the plot at all in this log, but things are about to get weird in movie land:
Today is my first day of the two months I took off to finish this movie, my day got started a bit later then I would have hoped but I had to start preparing several things for the upcoming months.
I got started working around 2 (had been hopping to get started around 11:30) I had to reinforce the set before doing any animation, sadly the detail work I did on the office is not visable in the set, got carried away I guess:
Then I built two faces for the building, one broken and the other unbroken, they can be swapped out painlessly:
After that I worked on a temp animation of an FX shot I am going to animate next, you can see the results here. It might be a little spoily, but that's not really an issue, and the shot is without any context. Now I need to animate it again with more shooting stuff with the pieces of the wall bursting out.
Wow, this is the first I've heard of this project and it's looking great! Can't wait to see the final film!
Like you said, you need to add parts of the wall exploding. The test version was too sudden of a change.
Well today marks the end of the first week I've taken off to finish this film. (I'm still actually working on Fridays so I have a little spare change for the weekends)
I have got 24.5 seconds of animation done this week, my weekly goal is 25 seconds. I feel really good about this, even though I was slightly short I finished shooting the city set so I couldn't have animated anything else without building another set. Also almost every shot I made was an effects shot which took a bit longer.
I made some car carnage with a bunch of cotton smoke effects, the cotton works great for hiding the sticky tack.
I ended up using this version of my pram, I could have spent all week refining the design, this version was instantly recognizable as a pram to non-LEGO folks and allowed me to have the mother easily take the baby out (which was important for the shot) and I just need to keep the pace up.
Earlier in the week I had been complaining I was not going to be able to use the detailed interior I had built but after story boarding out the scene (it was somewhat complicated so I had to) I found a way to incorporate it. Here it is with some guns I also designed this week:
Overall this was an extremely successful week, and a good start to my two months of time off I have to work on this project. If I have calculated the length of the final project correctly (around 5 min) I should be able to finish it at this pace. Set building takes me a while, but I hope I can build the last two sets in about a week per set. I may have to order some parts from Bricklink but I do have some animation I can do without sets, one thing I plan to use in this movie is a cloud tank, so if I am waiting for some parts in the mail I am going to rent a high def camera that can shoot in 1080p @ 60fps so I can get some cool atmospheric gaseous cloud FX for the 11th dimension.
The next set I am building will be the Oval Office, so that will be what I start on Monday.
You know that vid has a "dont try this at home" clause ...
(siff that ever stopped anyone)
Are you serious? I should probibly put 'Kid's don't try this at home' on every tip I offer people about lighting because you can get burnt using real movie lights. The old thing that can happen with the cloud tank is flooding, I have this under control.
They're probably just worried about the wellbeing of the fish.
(ill return this thread back on topic now ...)
So, 24 seconds, at. ... 15fps?
Yes it's 15 frames a second, after I got off work I decided to do a little out take audio animation so I filmed this, it's a little sloppy with some set bumps but it's one 19 second take of some of the 'massive' amount of stuff I recorded during the voice acting sessions. Dialog animation is really easy for me do do and I wasn't planning to work on my movie on Friday anyway so here is a taste of what a voice session with me is like
OK, so it's time for my weekly update:
I started on Monday by deconstructing and sorting the city, it's wierd even though I knew it was really big, I don't feel like I relized how big it was till I was holding the skyscrapers in my hands:
After the sorting was done I needed to start on the Oval Office set, I looked at quite a few references as well as Jonathan Vaughan's Picturesque, I have to say that as far as my intention as a film maker, Picturesque basicly sums up every sort of thing that I am trying to avoid in my films (not to downplay the work and talent Jonathan put into that film) re-watching it I sort of felt like it was a film which strove for realism and it almost felt like it was ashamed to be a LEGO film.
I decided I was going to fudge a lot of the scale of the Oval Office to fit details I wanted to show, like the seal in the carpet, which is in reality, much smaller then the seal I used.
This was my first LEGO mosaic and I am really happy how it turned out. I needed this set to be raised a bit from my main 'stage level' so I built a new column system that turned out to be insainly strong:
Many of you may have seen the final design in the Props and Critique thread for the Oval Office. I managed to get the animation I wanted done by Wednesday, getting a set built in two days and animated in one is unprecedented for me, I had kind of anticipated that set design might last a week, but I guess this set is on a much smaller scale then what I have been working with. I came back today and desided to add in one extra shot on this set I hadn't planned on, an establish shot of the two charicters walking into the room that was basically a unapologetic copy of a Wes Anderson style shot which I shot with the CRAZY f-stop of f22
This week I got 19 seconds of animation finished. Next week I will start building the huge set which the film's climax takes place on! If I finish animating that set with enough time on my break from work left I can hopefully build and animate the final (optional) set. I have something I don't need to finish my movie but it really just depends if I have time to build it, we'll see, I have 6 weeks left of my time off work.
So do you cycle and build sets at the same time, or... 
This is looking really great; I love the tiles around the edge of the floor to distinguish the carpet and add realism, it looks great.
Wes Anderson style shot which I shot
You mean, like when the symmetry of the shot is almost perfect? That kind of shot?
Anyways, really nice-looking sets, and that goes for the exterior design of the White House as well.
So do you cycle and build sets at the same time, or...
Yeah, I've got a special building work station built into my messenger bag, can't really animate while cycling though, can't find any cords long enough for the lighting.
This is looking really great; I love the tiles around the edge of the floor to distinguish the carpet and add realism, it looks great.
Thanks, the studs vs plates thing came about when I had enough brown plates for the wood floor but not enough plates for the carpet and not enough colored and blue plates for the carpet to be flat, it turned out for the best.
@Mickey
Yeah, although I kind of messed up on the symmetry of the two walls, the doorways don't quite match up and it's bugging me, but really only as a still, the shot is pretty quick and it's hard to notice that kind of details in sequence.
Cool beard
Im loving the sets
So I am starting off the week with some clean up and sorting so I can start building the next set and I am looking at the absurd quantity of windows I have. I have about 3 ideas for future projects that I am seriously considering and I am not going to need this insane quantity of windows for them. I was thinking of maybe selling 40 windows for about half what it would cost on bricklink if someone has a city scene they could really use them for here. This is what 40 windows looks like:
Half cost would be about $15 + shipping, each of these will cost you around $0.63 on Bricklink if you want to get them at this quantity, people sell the windows piece and the glass plate separately. At $15 you would get each window for $0.375 each. I don't know if anyone is interested but I will have over twice this amount left over and I don't really need to horde them (I might regret this in 5 years) But it would be great to keep them in the Brickfilming community.
Edit:
After a bit of reserch and mucking about I've decided I want my next set to sort of be like a mix of the Large Hadron Collider and this M-Tron thing with a classic space color scheme. um... help, I'm insane...
I'm stuck waiting for a bunch of Bricklink orders, the current set I am building will hopefully look spectaculare, although the picture I took of it leaves a lot to be desired. Sadly the modified octagonal's I needed for the set could only be purchased from European Bricklinkers I had to choose from German and Italy, for some reason Italy's postal system seems to be stuck in the dark ages and anytime I order something from there it seems to take months, the German seller sent me an invoice in just a few hours after I purchased it and shipped it the next day so hopefully I get those in a reasonable time.
One thing I was thinking for the set was I could have most of it be a man made structure, but with breaks in the wall where the craggy rocks the chamber was carved in jut out onto the set, I feel like that might give the set a bit more visual interest then just a industrial sci-fi interior.
So with a lot of waiting on my hands I am getting ready to shoot the cloud tank, a while back I purchased a HUGE fish tank for $20 from a school that needed to get rid of it in a hurry, I have been putting off cleaning it for a while, there were tons of hard water stains on the tank.
I would prefer the glass of the tank to be invisible for my shots so I started putting some elbow grease into it. I did some research and a vinegar lemon solution is supported to remove them, so I picked up some from the store and ended using up the entire (tiny) bottle of vinegar and I didn't fully remove the hard water stains. But it was a lot cleaner and I figured I should do a check to make sure that the tank does not leak, it would be disastrous to start to fill a 60 gallon (227 liters) tank only to discover someone sold me a leaky tank.
Filling the tank was apparently quite exciting for my room mates little two year old:
And looks like the tank is leak free! Woo!
A few weeks ago I was at a friends birthday party and met a photographer there that has a camera that can shoot in 60fps who is interested in helping me with the live action cloud tank stuff, so that could save me a $275 camera rental! The downside it can only shoot at 720p 
but I think I am just going to upscale it to 1080p, it is footage that will be composited in with other footage and I think I can get away with it, and if I really am unhappy with the footage I can go out and rent that insanely expensive camera and redo it. But I would really rather not spend $275 if I could.
Not convinced the tank - with heavy water - should be supported like that for a long period of time - but - I'm sure you know what you're doing.
I know you've spoken about the cloud tank but what is your intention with that? How will that fit in with the brick film? Will it be a part of a blue screen? No spoilers thanks!
see if you know anyone with a hero3 black.
I think it can shoot 1080p @ 60fps, then, if your brickfilm is at 15fps, you can make 1 second into 4.
I know you've spoken about the cloud tank but what is your intention with that? How will that fit in with the brick film? Will it be a part of a blue screen? No spoilers thanks!
There will be a character in the 11th dimension and travel that takes place through alternate demensions, currently I have some After Effects experiments that I was initaily planning to use but I've never been super happy with the results, I have some ideas on how to use a cloud tank where I could get the effects I need without using CGI, plus the idea of doing experimentation with high speed photography in a cloud tank is just exciting to me, that sort of thing is basically why I make films to begin with.
see if you know anyone with a hero3 black.
I think it can shoot 1080p @ 60fps, then, if your brickfilm is at 15fps, you can make 1 second into 4.
I need interchangeable lenses. A Hero3 rental is $35 but for some of the shots I want to do I will need the longest lens I can fit on my camera, if I had a 60 foot balcony using my 300mm lens would be ideal for what I need but I don't have that much ceiling space. I would rather have lens flexibility at 720p then a fixed wide angle lens at 1080p at a much cheaper cost.
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