The most common question I get asked by people who’ve seen this site has to be “How do you do that?” To date, no-one has asked “How do you get to be so cool?” That’s OK, I can wait. To answer the other question, there’s a lot of stuff involved in making these films but, once you know the basics, it’s pretty easy to just sit down and get on with it. I’ve broken it down into sections below. It’s a work in progress, so don’t expect a comprehensive set of instructions or anything. Don’t expect it to be especially funny either. I’m just answering the questions. You don’t need a fancy camera to make these films. In fact, given the size of LEGO minifigs, you’re better off with something smaller so you can get in close. The ideal solution for the amateur animator is a webcam. They’re relatively cheap and they feed a live signal directly into your computer, making it easy to capture frames using the various capture programs available. If you’re looking to get a webcam for stop motion animation, aim for one with a CCD chip.
Cheaper webcams usually come equipped with a CMOS chip, which tends not to cope as well with the low light and gives a grainier picture. I used a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 for everything up to and including Pneuma. It’s reasonably cheap, it has a manual focus ring with a really tight focal length, it has a CCD chip and it works well in low(ish) light conditions. The 4000 isn’t in production anymore but there are better alternatives available now anyway. My webcam finally stopped working, so from Pneuma through to Reservoir Squads, I used a Panasonic mini-DV camcorder. There are advantages and disadvantages to changing. On the plus side, I can change focus quite smoothly now and, if I’m careful, zoom in and out. On the minus side, the camera is a lot bigger, so it’s harder to get in close or do tracking shots with the camera sitting right next to the set. Just lately, I’ve gone back to a webcam again. The Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 lets you shoot at HD resolutions and has a software-controlled manual focus, so you don’t have to touch the camera when you change focus.
The only drawback for me is that the lens is a little too wide-angle for me – I have to make the backgrounds of my shots bigger now. You really need to light things up bright to get a high quality picture. If the light is too low, the picture becomes grainy. You also need a constant light source. Avoid direct sunlight at all costs. It’s nice and bright but the sun doesn’t stay in one place in the sky. As you animate, the sun moves and the shadows it casts move. You may not notice it while you’re filming but when you play your shot back you’ll see a lot of crazy twirling shadows. My preferred option is to use halogen desk lamps. They’re easy to position and you can get them pretty cheap. You need to be careful not to get them too close to your plastic bricks though because they can give off a fair amount of heat. You can also enhance the lighting of your set by using reflectors. Bouncing the light from a desklamp off a piece of white card will give you more diffuse lighting and fewer harsh shadows.
I use a Windows PC, so that’s what I’m going to describe. Others have had success using Macs and Linux but you’d have to ask them how they did it. I started out using Anasazi Stop Motion Animator (SMA). It’s free, it’s small and it does almost everything you need. Some people have had problems with incompatible cameras or other USB devices interfering, but I never had a problem. I’m now using Stop Motion Pro, mainly because it includes a frame averaging feature that does a good job of clearing up the grain that you get when you’re filming indoors in low light. You can approach this hobby in a number of ways. When I started out, I just took a handful of minifigs, had a rough idea of what they were going to do, and started animating. You can see the results of this approach on the vaults page. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I still like the zombie one. An alternative is to follow the practices of professional animators and rigorously plan, script, storyboard and time every last frame.
I generally go for something in between. Work out timing, stick to 15fps where possible, try to watch how people move in real life, ease in and out of actions. Other people can describe this in a lot better detail than me. Work out how things will be edited beforehand so you only shoot what you need. There are some basic tricks like always show the face of the person who’s talking (given that reaction shots are a bit wasted on minifigs), don’t cross the imaginary line in a conversation, etc. In order to make your film available on the internet, you have to upload it to a server. That may seem like an obvious thing to say but you’d be surprised how many people don’t realise. If you have your own webspace, you can upload it there, but be aware that the bandwidth limits on free webspace mean that your film won’t be available for long. Fortunately, there are some free options for uploading films: If you disagree with anything I’ve said here or have more information to add, especially regarding animation software for non-Windows platforms, please get in touch.
If you’ve read this whole page, congratulations. You now know as much as I do. Now go and animate something. I’ve always been one to figure things out. It’s part of the reason I became a filmmaker even though web consulting is my primary profession. In fact, it is what got me into web consulting in the first place. One thing that always fascinated me was stop motion animation. As I kid, I tried to do it using a video camera, but back then the tape would randomly rewind a few seconds before filming, which made it nearly impossible to get the timing down (I’d usually record over the previous frame) Now, with the advent of digital photography & software that allows you to control your camera, stop motion animation is much more accessible. After some experimentation, I landed a gig shooting a stop motion animated video for LEGO. Here is one of my first stop motion animation pieces: Then I shot another stop motion, this time for the Duck Tape brand for their decorated shipping tape:
LEGO hired me back to shoot a video for their LEGO City line, which resulted in this video which has over a half a million views on various websites: Then I was selected to create a pilot episode for Cleatus, the Fox Sports NFL mascot. Unfortunately, the pilot didn’t go past the pilot stage, but here’s a screenshot: Hopefully I’ll be able to share it some day (the problem w/ making videos for others is that you don’t always get to share your work). For nearly all of my stop motion videos, my 8-year old son helps out. He always wanted to shoot a LEGO Star Wars stop motion, so I helped him plan out his story, shots, and with the camera setup. Here’s the fun video we created: During this past year I also started teaching a stop motion animation class at an elementary school and even hosted a workshop at a conference. My latest gig was for LEGO’s new Castle line, where I shot part 5 of a 6-part series & was tasked with creating a toy-story like experience (hence the dog).