Avengers Tower: Invasion

After rewrites, reshoots, much kafuffery and myriad setbacks, it's done.

Avengers Tower: Invasion is my longest brickfilm to date, coming in at a grand 8 minutes 21 seconds. It's possibly the most complex I've ever done too, and considering my own internal controversies over this brickfilm, I figured it warranted a proper write-up, just for me to explain everything that went on while I was putting this hunk a' junk together.

The origin story
From March through to August last year I was working on Avengers Tower, a series of fight videos for another channel (though I moved them back to my channel after a disagreement). They were Avengers 'training' fight sequences, and I started trying to use more minor Marvel characters. Anyway, the third video was originally going to be a brainless fight against Ultron and his AIM minions, and so I started animating before I really had a clear idea. At this time, it was called Ultron Ascending, and would be released in two parts. However, part one received a lot of negative backlash, and issues with this other channel caused me to shelve Ultron Ascending.

The dilemma
Ultron Ascending was a really low point for me. I was just about to head off to university and wasn't sure whether I would be able to continue brickfilming there or not (more on that later) and when the reaction to this was so poor, I hated that it could be one of the last things I'd be able to make for a while. It became a sore spot, and I wanted to put the very memory of it out of my mind.

However, I still had about 5 minutes worth of animation done, and a super-complex 1 minute digital intro. That's more than I've ever filmed/edited of anything before, and while I wasn't pleased with much of it, I thought it would be a shame to let it go to waste. At this time, I had also just started talking to Galactic Bricks about a shared LEGO Marvel universe, since I wanted to attempt a different, fresher Avengers project at some point soon. So, I made the decision to try and find a way to use the Ultron Ascending footage.

Invaders assemble
The main difficulty in rewriting Ultron Ascending was that it was such a small-scale story, and the original script had Ultron be destroyed. Thus the first thing I decided to do was have Ultron only appear in a behind-the-scene capacity, and let the Avengers just fight AIM, who I decided (being an organisation of techno-geeks) would somehow have come under the android's sway. Since, with the MBU now better formed in my mind, I wanted to add more set-up for future brickfilms, I tried to interweave some backstory for the robot, while at the same time not making it too oblique. Annoyingly, the original footage, didn't have any space for me to add more in, so it feels like all the build-up is in the second half.

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Which brings me to my honest truth about the film: I don't like it. It hasn't been much fun to work on: it's riddled with light flicker (in both the new and old footage) which I just seem to get rid of, the story is a bit half-hearted, hastily edited, dodgy VFX, and it represents an unpleasant part of my brickfilming career...I'm already looking at how to make my next large project more of a departure from this. While I made the best of a bad situation, there's so much I've learned from how not to brickfilm.

So I hope you enjoy watching this more than I did making it, basically. I've had months of wanting to work on something else but being driven (for some inexplicable reason) to finish this, and I'm not satisfied with the end result.

On a lighter note...

The MBU
Now this I am pleased with. Together with Galactic Bricks, I've been working on establishing a lot of backstory canon, planning lots of brickfilms, and have even begun filming on a few of them. Black Panther: The Gold Vibranium is my next Marvel brickfilm, while a Doctor Strange tribute is also in the works. I'm also quite happy that I've managed to do two episodes of SHIELD Declassified, which you can view on the MBU playlist. Big things are in the works, and while I'm going to be working on some non-Marvel projects too, the MBU has a lot of my attention. Future installments will be far better than Invasion. That's a promise.

The one good thing that did come out of Invasion was the amount of set-up I managed to add without making it clunky. I've established Ultron, AIM (including Andrew Forson, who'll return in Black Panther), Superior Spider-man, and even threw in Inhumans and the High Evolutionary (shhh, spoilers), all of which will have further repercussions in the MBU.

There's better to come, and now that Invasion isn't at the front of my mind I have time to work on becoming better. Like I said, there's so much I've learned about what not to do, and I'll be experimenting with new techniques to try and improve my work.

That's all I have to say for now. I do hope you enjoyed Invasion, and I hope you'll enjoy the future of the Marvel Brickfilm Universe!

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First Age of Ultron teaser!

The SDCC teaser for The Avengers: Age of Ultron is finally online, and it looks...well, see for yourself.

I understand some people might be disappointed by the lack of actual footage in this, but give Disney a break. The movie doesn't come out for two years, and it's still knee-deep in pre-production. Honeslty, I think it's so much the better for not having random flashes of pointless footage or being an endless series of sweeping lens flares - we see Ultron people. Disney's just given us a good glimpse at Ultron. Granted, he looks exactly the same as he does in the comics, but it's nice to see the cinema interpretation of the world-killing android, especially two years ahead of the film's release.

Then, of course, we get to the question of Hank Pym. I've always seen him as an integral part of the Avengers line-up, and just as integral to Ultron's story. However, Whedon seems to have cut him out and made Tony Stark Ultron's creator instead. As painful as it is that they would change such a big piece of comic canon for the screen, I think this works very well; we've seen how crazy Stark is about his tech (remember that 'house party' in Iron Man 3?), so it's only the natural evolution of his story that he would one day create something that went wrong. Dangerously wrong. As in 'destroy the world' wrong. It would take too much time in the new movie to set up Hank Pym and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver (who I am really excited to be seeing onscreen).

Finally, we get to the titles themselves. And the screams. Lots of screaming. Talk about setting the tone - Disney doesn't want us to forget that in many of the comic runs he appears in, Ultron kills anything from thousands to millions to, in his most recent run (also called Age of Ultron, though totally not worth a read) billions of puny humans. He's a furious killing machine that's more than a match not just for the Avengers, but for the whole world.

So now I'm really excited for The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and that's why. Not that I wasn't excited before, but now we have this teaser as proof of how awesome the movie is going to be. Joss knows what he's doing, and he's doing it right.