How Brickfilm Works

that name, that just flashed me back. A great name, old yep O, l E. I think we should go buy old Josh Clark and all right, Chuck Bryant, that's definitely how it goes. Well, I'll bet you something. Chucker's back in nine two when old Kirk Christensen founded Lego and Bill and Denmark Bill, when don't you say is the name? Yeah? You mean when he founded Automatic Binding Bricks. Right, he didn't call him Lego at first? Um like it

was definitely more gratty. Yeah, well, he came up with um Lego apparently, And I remember us debating this or not. But so I looked around and this is what I see everywhere, including on the Lego site that lego is two words leg goat, which means play well, g o dt. But lego also means I put together in Latin. I believe. Yeah, yep. Well, anyway, when he was coming up with this, I'll bet he never thought these are going to be used to make hundreds and thousands of short stop motion films are gonna

delight millions of people around the world one day. Probably never thought about that, No, but they do. I wonder what old Kirk thought when he stepped on one with his bare feet. He thought, Yeah, he's man, this is going to take off a lot of parents for the next three thousand years. It's not fun, so chuck um. I don't know if you caught it or not. I just made a reference to brick films. Did you catch

the reference I did? Stop motion? Well, I guess the animation really is what it what it comes down to, That's exactly what it is. One of the earliest forms of animation because, um, all it involves is moving something, taking a photo of it, moving it just a little bit more, taking another picture, and doing that until you want to kill yourself pretty much. And that stop motion animation requires a lot of patients I've made a few

of them myself. And when I say a few of them, I mean one complete one with my brother with g I Joe's with the Super eight. I made about probably twelve seconds of one with Star Wars figures in my twenties, and then about thirty seconds of one with Clay. I built a little theater box set and everything made a guy look great out of sculpie, and um, I think he got out of bed, went over to the dresser, I got a shirt, and like went and exited the door. And then I was like, I'm done. It's took so long.

The rest of his day that you had the script for is just no. Yeah. It looked good though, and I was proud of it, but it's just not for me. Well, you need to post those on YouTube. Man, They're on VHS somewhere. I can dig these things up. You need to get them on the YouTube. The world can access your VHS tapes. So what do I Just get the VHS tape and I just bang it on my laptop and it gets on YouTube. Okay, as long as there's a black monol with in the background behind you, Yeah, yeah,

it'll work all right. I'll have to try that. Uh so you never use Legos though, never use Legos um. But I do think Legos are made for this kind of thing because not only do they click into place, which is key because you don't want stuff moving around, but they these days they are all kinds of pre packet Lego sets that are just little film sets waiting

to be made into movies. Like I mean that that's probably the reason why it took off so much, because Lego keeps building these sets that are like Harry Potter sets or Star Wars sets or Marvel Superhero sets, um. And then there's Lego competitors like Mega Blocks that has licenses for like the Halo video game series or Hello Kitty or Barbie. Right. Yeah, so all you have to do is get like a one of these packages, one of these sets, and all of a sudden you have

a movie set. If you have a lot of patients, uh, camera of any sort really is we'll see, um and something that animated with basically a light source, not a lot of stuff you can get. When I was doing it, it was about as bare bones as it got. It was working on a tabletop with a couple of you know, the little clip on aluminum light you get at the hardware store. You can use those. What are those worklights? Work floods? Yeah, just a little worklights. They get hot,

they sure do. Um, and I didn't have any, you know, I had a tripod and a camera because you want to keep things super still. Definitely need a tripod. Definitely need a tripod. Or if you are fancy or have friends that are fancy and have a slider, you know, it's it's basically like a little mini dolly that your camera can sit on in there, you know, three to four ft long, and then you can do little dolly moves and camera moves on your slider and keep it

nice and straight. Or if you have some ingenuity, which you probably do if you're making a brick film, you can make your own little skateboard dolly out of skateboard wheels and PBC pipe. Yeah, you just make a little track and then um attached like you know, you basically you can. There's a lot of ways can do it, but like a baseboard to sit the camera on with

track wheels to guide along the PBC pretty neat. So um, what we're talking about specifically our brick films and one of the There aren't a lot of requirements to make a brick film aside from what you're saying, but one of them is that legos have to kind of feature prominently. Most brick films are stop motion, and one of the things, in addition to having like Harry Potter sets or um outer space sets, are all these different sets that are like many movie sets right out right out of the box.

Um are the mini figures. Um there, those are your actors typically. Yeah, they didn't come along to the late seventies. Yeah, and then now I think they're the largest population on the planet. Oh really, Yeah, I remember there's like four billion of them or something like that. You know, they made more tires than anyone else. But yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Yeah, I came along. My lego experience was pre uh figure. So we had to we had to make our own little men and women out of smaller

legos in the snowy ways. These make sense, they look cooler. Yeah. So most brick films are stop motion. Some people actually filmed the the um lego figures and characters moving, I would guess, so I would think it's not quite as time consuming though wire work and stuff. I bet it's frustrating. But I mean, if you have like all of your lego figures on roller skates or something, you just kind of drag them along. Sure, you don't have to take

picture picture picture. You kind of film them moving with stop motion. That's very it's much. It's the opposite. Basically. It's like you said, you you set up your your your shot, you take a photo of it, and then you move the person a little bit, like if they're walking, you would move their arm, one of their arms down, another one up, and one leg out a little bit, and the other one back a little bit, and then take that picture and so on and so on and um.

What you're ultimately doing is recreating motion, right right, um, using inanimate objects. And the way you recreate motion is by the frames per second, which is a film speed, and film shoots it or plays I should say, at twenty four frames per second, which means that every second of film you see, you're actually being shown twenty four still photographs in secession. Yeah, that's for film. Video is thirty frames per second. And there are there are variations

on all this to achieve different looks, you know. Um, but if you are just doing the math if you want to do a stop motion film, a five minute stop motion film at twenty four fps frames per second would be seventy two individual photographs. Right, that's for five minutes. Five minute film. Means you have to take that many photographs in order and in between photographs. You can't just sit there and take shotographs. Rust just gonna have seventy

two hundred of the same pictures. There's seventy two hundred slightly different pictures where one is slightly different from the last. Yes, one way you can cheat that a little bit, um is if you just double it up and you use two frames um for each move. So you would take twelve pictures for a second of um video, right, well, and then just use them twice and that would make

it a four second, four frames per sent. Yeah, it's gonna look a little more herky jerky, but um, the nature of the brick film is a little herky jerky anyway because of the way they move and the the range of motion on the little figures. So it's not like if you took completely bendable action figures. You know, you can get a lot more smooth, detailed moves. Yeah, people aren't expecting your lego thing to move completely seamlessly. That's not how legos move. They've got I think four

four points of movement. Yeah, their shoulders and their hips. Okay, so they don't have like elbows or knees, and then technically you can say their head has a range of motion. Five. You just acted out a lego movement. It's very adorable. Which people could see the stuff? Josh, thanks man. All right, well let's take a little break here in um, get back to some lighting techniques right after this. All right, Josh, you've you've built your You've got your Ghostbusters lego kit,

Lego brand kit. Right. Um, you want to make a seque old to Ghostbusters because Ghostbusters too was horrible? Not true? Did you like it? Sure? It was a Ghostbusters movie. It was great, boy, So you want to make Ghostbusters three because you thought two was so good it deserved its own sequel. All right, Um, and you want to get some lights already said you can. You can go cheap and just get those little aluminum lights if you have, if you really want to get serious, you can rent

lights from a camera house. You can go to your friend Scott's sure be like, I know you have some lights. Yeah, or here at how stuff works. We have the use of lights. Yeah, if you're making a brick film, drop Bible'll lend you some lights. No, don't do that. Um. Basically, lighting is gonna do a few things. It's gonna light up your set so people can see it a uh and be. It can help you set a mood for sure, like whether it's day or night, or noir or sunny,

like a bright sunny day. Uh. And what you're really looking to do, though, is have complete control of your your lighting, because one thing that can really thwart your brick film is any change in lighting. You won't notice it. You'll just take your little picture and then you'll see flickering going on when you play it back. And that's because someone turned on a light in the other room next to you and you didn't notice it. So you want to black out all the curtains. Just get in

a room where you have complete control over the lighting. Yeah. That's the same reason why you don't want to shoot a brick film or any kind of stop motion outdoors, because the sun changes its lighting to be impossible fairly regular rate yea faster than you can shoot and move. Um. So yeah, you want to totally be able to control lighting. So once you have your lighting under total control, you

want to use usually about three lights at least. Put on your black turtleneck, yeah, or like your black roots suit or something like that. Ye even better, uh huh. And and don't let anybody see like that, because they're gonna be like, you're a total weirdo locked away in this room with no windows, wearing a black roots who playing with your light lego mini things And you'd say, no, I'm a filmmaker, right, brigg filmmaker and they would just

back out of the room slowly. Yeah, exactly. So, Um, you you use one light for backlighting, use that behind the thing behind your shot. You um have a key lighting which is the front. And then you also want to have some sort of bounce and um you can basically replace that third light source with even just like a white sheet of paper something to reflect light off that that's very mobile, so you can director wherever you need it. And the whole point of this is to

light normally, but also to chase off shadows. Yeah, if you've never let anything, you're going to be frustrated at first because you're lego characters are gonna have like two different shadows going in two different directions, and the first thing you're gonna think is, well, that doesn't look like real life. So you can do two things. You can experiment around with your phil lights until you get rid of your shadows, or you can get a book or

look on the internet. Just some very basic lighting techniques. Um, it's not super complicated. It's nobody tough to get like, really good at it. It's not necessarily intuitive where you're like, oh, this guy looks like a soccer player in a night game. He's got four shadows everywhere exactly, So how do I get rid of that? Oh, it's this bounce. I would say this would be one of those times when it's best to just rely on the wisdom of others who

have come before. Yeah, and that wisdom on the internet. The yeah, exactly. Um, the the lights too, you're gonna want to diffuse it. It's it's probably gonna be way too harsh coming directly off the bulb. So um, you can use like wax paper or a handkerchief or in anything that doesn't catch on fire. Uh ideally, Yeah, and you do in your grandfather's room and get a handkerchief out of his gesture drawer exactly with the initials H monogrammed.

It's old krusty brown snot Yeah. I used to think that was so gross when I was a little it is. It's like, oh man, they're blowing their nose and they're putting it in, they're puttying it away for safekeeping. Gross. It was a less wasteful generation, though they didn't fill a plan fills with clinics. That is true, you know, so it took I pretty much feel like we just gave a great clinic on lighting. Yeah, shoots some test footage. Don't dive right in there, you know, monkey around with it.

Oh yeah, you're gonna be really mad or your thing's gonna look terrible at first, and then get progressively better as the final final thing goes on. Say yeah, you want to learn by doing yeah, and yeah, just do some exercises, all right. We talked a little bit about equipment. Uh, they are all kinds of cameras you can use. Um. What I used on the last one, which was super handy, was a camera that had a remote control so you could just click off the photos without having to touch

the camera. That is very advisable. Yea. Once you have the camera set, it's really nice to not touch it again if you don't have to. Yeah, because again you're moving the stuff within this world, not the camera, at least for the shot you're taking. And again, if you if you have a three second shot, that's what seventy two photos you need to take from that exact same position. Yeah, right, So yeah, you don't want that camera to move at all or else is gonna be some weird jarring and

stuff like that. And the best way to do that is a remote capture camera. That really helps. Um, if you have an auto focus slash manual focus, you want to turn it off the auto focus, make it fixed focus, manual focus you can. Again, you're just looking for complete control, uh auto focus little you know, you don't want to focus on the wrong thing, especially if, like um, your your many figures coming closer to the camera every time.

That's gonna change that auto focus and you're every every photo in the frame is gonna look slightly different or fuzzy or just completely changed from time to time. Not good. Yeah, you're after consistency, uh, consistency through control pretty much if you have a digital zoom camera you want to you

want an optical zoom? What is that? Uh? It's basically I think a digital zoom simulates the image rather than it being actually so it digitizes the zoom at a certain point and it's not as high quality now it

looks it always looks crutty in my opinion. So, yeah, you want to control, so a true zoom basically you remember the camera, yes you know, yeah, creep that little thing in like a dolly right, or if you have your slider you're all set there, so where you can say it's like a what you basically want to be like Nikolai cho Chesk or eat a mean of of your mini films set here? You want like total control over everything. I thought you were gonna say, like Orson Welles,

like he's to even worse. Okay, Uh so we talked about bumping the camera. You also don't want to bump your film set. Yeah, I mean that can really ruin your day at the end of a long day if you bump it and all your stuff falls over. So clamp that stuff down, clamp your set down, glue it down, do whatever you have to do to keep it as ruded as possible. Yeah, and don't let anyone anywhere near it now because it's my lego set and I'm the outdoor.

So we've got some more stuff, some more awesome UM recommendations, and we're gonna get to it right after this, Chuck, I really feel like we're helping a lot of people here. I think so too. So we talked about lighting, we've talked about the kind of camera equipment you watch or UM and a lot of well, especially the Brick film which we'll talk about later, UM, are silent. They're silent films,

which means you don't have to worry about sound. But there's a lot of them that do have sound, dialogue all that stuff, UM, and you don't have to worry

about recording that as you go along. Most of the sound can be recorded in post production, but you want to have an idea of what is going to be said where or what what your soundtrack is going to be like, because you have to figure out how long each shot needs to be and how many ultimately how many photos you need to take within a given scene or else, like the voiceover is still going when you just change scenes and your your entire family and friends

will laugh at you. When you show them your brick film. You don't want to be the Edwood of brick films. He just did not care. He didn't care. It was great. That movie was great. My favorite or one of my favorite parts, aside from everything Bill Murray did, was when tour like bumps the wall in the way in and they're like, don't you want to shoot that to or just walked in the wall, He's like, no, I like it. It's real. Let's use it. Um so expressions and drama.

These little lego folks aren't super expressive in the face, but they suggested in this article, and it kind of makes sense. Pop that head off and put on something else, you know, could be a pink pong ball that you draw faces on. Well, there there are different many figs that have um different expressions yea, and so you can just interchange their heads. Okay, So if someone needs to

look up horrors, put on the horror face. Um. And then apparently there's companies that will customize facial expressions on your mini figures. Yeah. And I imagine if you have some money and you can get that done. That's right. Uh, And now I want to go not off topic, but off article and say story, story, story. If you are going to make a brick film or any film, have

a good story. Just just because it's a two minute lego brick film, it's gonna stink if it's just you know, no matter how good it looks, it's not gonna be fun to watch unless you have a good little story. So like, write something out that's good and engaging or funny, and it doesn't have to be super long to have a little character arc or story arc. Have your guy chased by something else. Yeah, Like I watched one the other day and it was it was fun, It was silly.

It was a one lego guy helping the guy next door do all his chores. Is that the the dandelion? Oh, I don't know the name of it. But he was, you know, helping him mo and helping him put on shutters and doing all this stuff and all the while like his home was getting beaten up, and it was just you know, that's all they needed was that one little joke at the end that they showed the nice house and then the house in tatters. It's a very

in Randy and brick film. Was it don't help your name, your own house will fall the pieces if you help your neighbor well to take care of yourself. The character was John Galt, so there may be something there. Um So anyway, yeah, story just uh, I would encourage you to make something engaging, uh, and then make it look good. Yeah, all right, that's my soapbox moment. That was great. Thanks,

that was good stuff. All right. So we're onto software, Yeah, I think so, because, um, you're going to find very quickly when you have shotos, you need a way to turn them into a video. They don't just automatically turn into a video like that. And you can't just do a flipbook on the internet because you'd have to shoot that anyway and run it through software eventually. So you might as well not go to that extra step. Just get yourself some stop stop motion um animating software, and

there's plenty of them out there. There's some that cost tons of money, some that are free. Lego has one, yeah, called Lego movie Maker. Yeah, it's a little app you can make your own little big encourage the making a brick films of course, right, So depending on the kind of software you have there there's some that will automatically

import from your camera. There's some that will. Um, that has something called onion skinning, which shows like a transparency of the last shot over the current shot, so you can make sure everything's going the way you need to say, if you need to stop and reshoot one of those photos, you know you can real quick. Um, it's got to

be super helpful to have that. And the whole thing is gonna put it all in order, animated, and then it's probably also going to have some sort of whiz bang features, Like there's one called rhodoscope which makes things glow, which comes in very handy if you're doing a Star Wars brick film and you want to make the lightsabers glow. That's right. Uh. Some of them might have other little c g I tricks built in, or you can do some low fi c g I of your own with

a little uh investigating and learning on the YouTube. Uh, it's not super hard to learn a couple of basic things. And again, these are brick films. This one that I watched had some low fi like fire effect, and um, you know it looked it looked great for what it was supposed to be. You know, it's not supposed to be a Hollywood action thriller. It's a brick film, so it can look kind of campy and corny and it still works. Did you ever see the Matrix brick film? Now?

It was a good Yeah. I think it's it's not even like a shot for shot thing of the matrix. It's like a like in addition to it, it's super gory and um, it just incredibly well done. It is like Hollywood action thriller brick film. Nice. You have to check that out. Well, there's hundreds and hundreds, I would say thousands, thousands at this point brick films. The first

one that they I watched this one. Actually in the ninety three, Lars and Einrich Hassing made a little super eight brick film called Journey to the Moon, and um, you know it's cute. It's uh, it's actually mother, it's like kids playing around. But and then it looks pretty good. Yes, and the especially when you consider that they were doing a film, yeah, and using like film editing software and

stuff to put this thing together. It's kind of mind blowing that these two kids put this together and made basically the first brick film. What's more, since it was nineteen seventy three, this was five years before the mini figures came out, so they had to build their own characters out of legos to good stuff. And then there's another classic brick film from the late nineteen nineties by Lindsay Flee and I think the late eighties. What I say late nineties, Yeah, late eighties is what I'm at,

the Magic Portal, and that was shot on sixteen millimeter film. Uh, yeah, it looks great. He's a he was a film student and actually got money from a grant from the Australian Film Commission, and um, a bunch of people donated lego sets and it looks really good. Yeah, and it took them years to do it. It took um, I think more than a year to just shoot the photos. Yeah. I mean, now you know why my films were all twelve seconds long, you know. Yeah, this one's like sixteen

minutes long. Crazy. What are some of the other big ones, Star Wars, the Han Solo Affair, Yeah, a lot of stars. Yeah. Have you seen Monty Python on Holy Grow shot for shot of the Camelot song this, and like, not only is it shot for shot, it's so great. They got the lighting correct on every shot. Like it's not like there's some inside Lego World. It looks like they took the original Monty Python this minute and fifteen second clip and like ran it through like a Lego Lego Nader. Wow,

Like they got the lighting perfect. You gotta see it, man, it's probably the best one. I have to check that out. And there's some really great ones out here, like again that Matrix one. I'm amazing. But um, and I have to say I am a fan of the Magic Portal now yeah, um, but this Monty Python one is just it's just mind blowing. And that was by spite your face. They seem to be the premier brick film studio. Yeah,

they do. Uh, they've done a lot of them. Um. I was about to remark about the attention to detail and like the Monty Python thing, but I think that's by nature what you're getting with these people who make these. If you don't have an attention, like a scary attention for detail, you're not gonna be working in stop motion anyway.

So that's why Stuffed By, like Nick Park and Ardment Animation did Wallace and Grommet and the Creature Comfort series, they look like the detail is so great because that's just their deal. California raisins remember then, Oh yeah, good attention to detail. Yeah. Uh did you see the Lego movie? I didn't. I didn't either. Hurdle was great, Yeah, I want to see it. But um, is it a brick

film or not? No? No, no it's not. It was all c g I s. Brick film doesn't have to be stopped motion, but typically it should be in at least like it should be real life Lego figures, not c g I ones. But um, apparently it had plenty of homages to brick films in general. Yeah, I didn't know that. I think that's kind of neat. Yeah. So the impression I have from researching this is that Lego as a company is very aware of brick films, obviously because they have the movie maker app They love it.

They give a ward out for brick films. Um, and in the Lego movie, it was kind of a tribute to brick films, a little tip of the old cap. Old Kirk Christensen would have been like, oh, yeah, Lego loves this stuff. You know, make a Star Wars one, make a Ghostbusters one, making Indiana Jones one, bye bye bye, don't make three Star Wars ones. Who would do that make a Star Wars and the Ghostbusters and a and a Planet of the Apes. Yeah exactly? Uh, you got

anything else? Mean? Nope? Brick films again. This is another entry in our quest to explain absolutely everything there is on Earth and beyond. So enjoy it, everybody, right not. If you want to know more about brick films, you can type that word one word into the search part how stuff works dot com. But even more than that, I would encourage you to just type that word into your favorite search engine and sit back and start watching

brick films. Delightful. They are amazing. Uh. And since I said your favorite search engine, it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this jokes to her husband. Hey, guys, to listen to the podcast on revenge this morning as usual. I really enjoyed. It made me think of a revenge story in my own life that backfired, uh then became something pretty amazing. My wife and are big jokesters. When we found when we were first married, my wife thought it would be funny to throw a bucket of cold

water over me while I was taking a shower. I told her that revenge is a dish best served old, which is, by the way, one of my favorite uh sayings of all time UH and that my revenge would come tenfold. So about three years and two children later, my wife took a pregnancy test, afraid that she was pregnant. Since our son was three our daughter was nine, my wife was a bit freaked out at having another kid.

Tests ended up being negative and she was relieved. She left the pregnancy tests in the back of the toilet went to grab its center while she was gone. Using a pen, I was able to make the pregnancy tests look positive and put it back where she left it. I never will forget the look of terror on her face when she eventually saw it came walking to the room with the test. I immediately started joking with her about how exciting it is and really playing up the ruse.

I didn't let her dangle too much though, before telling her the truth. It was a good time and last for had by all. One month later, she actually was pregnant and quickly found out that we had twins. So to this day she playfully blames me for our seven year old twin boys. It was a great uson in karma and the aftermathod of revenge isn't always a bad thing. This world wouldn't be the same without our two little guys.

What a sweet dude. So that Danny DeMarco started off as kind of like a jerky thing to do, but it turned out great. Nice Thanks Danny DeMarco from Dallas. Great name to Danny DeMarco, di Dallas. If you want to get in touch with this like Danny did, you can tweek to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcast to how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff

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