Lego City - The Movie!!!

The Story of "Lego City"

"Lego City" is about the creation of a city from scratch where a lot of interesting things happen.  You might have to watch it three or four times to see everything and catch all of the action.

Each of us, the directors, worked on our own corner of the city.  Here's how we divided up the set:

 Daniel    

  

 David

 

 Tim

 

 Amanda 

 

As the buildings grew we moved our lego actors around to create situations for the characters.  Some of them, as you will see in the movie, work together, help each other out, run around, fly around, ride around, walk around, and fall around.  The actors do all of their own stunts.   Dopey had a stunt double.  :-)

Enjoy this great movie!

 

The Making of "Lego City"

Step 1: Preproduction

Before we could start shooting the movie we had a bunch of decisions to make.  We also had to get all of our stuff together to make the movie.  Here's a list of the things that we needed to take care of ahead of time.

Props Legos, Deer Park sign, "Dopey" double
Story Building a city then making things happen with the characters
Research What else do we need to make the movie?
Set Lego table
Cast Lego people
Scenery Back wall
Equipment Camcorder, Tripod, tapes, batteries

Lighting

 Overhead

Photography 

Stop-action frames

Length

 Hoping for 1 or 2 minutes

 

Step 2: Production

On January 17, 2001 and January 24, 2001 we shot the movie one frame at a time.  In each new frame, each of us added, moved, or removed a lego from the set.  Then a snap shot was taken with the camcorder.  Some of the photographic techniques used by our camera crew were zooming into the set and panning or turning around the set.  Our story also involved action and stunts.  The stunts included:

 

Step 3: PostProduction

After the filming we needed to hook the camcorder up to the computer and digitize the video.   We didn't know how many snap shots we had until this was finished.  Here's what we did to put the movie together:

  1. Replay the video into the computer and capture each snap shot.
  2. We found out that we had taken 260 pictures or frames.
  3. Get rid of the blooper frames (see 4 frames below).
  4. Put all of the good frames together.
  5. Decide how many frames per second (fps) we wanted for the movie.  We chose 4 fps so that our movie would be one minute long at least.
  6. Saved the movie as a file.

With the computer and some animation software we added our title frame and credits to the movie.  In the credits we used 2 special effects.  The last frame of the movie from the set fades into the credit frame.  And the credits twist near the end.  Now the movie part was done.

We watched the movie a bunch of times so that we could think of ideas for the soundtrack to the movie.  That was the next step.  Some of us know how to play piano so we started to record music that we wanted to use in the movie.  We also recorded our voices.

Next we digitized the recorded music and voices so that these were also on the computer.  Then we used software to paste the music and voices into the movie where we wanted it.  And then we saved the movie again.

So now the movie included the pictures and the sounds and the movie file was 87Meg large.  We needed to get the movie ready for our web site by using QuickTime software to make the movie smaller.  We compressed the 87Meg movie and turn it into a 3Meg movie.

 

Bloopers

Thought you might like to see the blooper frames that we took out of the movie!