I've been saving these clips up over the course of the last year, although many of these are from October onwards.
This is the start of my new drive to create more brickfilms. In the coming month alone I should have at least two short videos for you, with The Ice Vampire coming hopefully by the end of January.
Sorry about the framing - I thought I'd been editing in widescreen, but alas nay.
And yes, I already have a couple of the new Chima sets - those Legend Beasts are surprisingly good sets, especially with the new ball-and-socket joint pieces, which are going to be really useful for stop-motion.
Dwarves are strong, right? Surely one boulder wouldn't be a problem? You thought wrong, my friend.
I animated this in July and, after remaking my studio, forgot I'd ever done it. Here it is in it's full, mishmashed glory! Half the editing was done in Premiere Elements, and half in Premiere Pro, and half the effects were done in VisionLab, the other half done in After Effects. Thought I'd edit it and upload since I didn't end up doing THAC this year (that's the Twenty-four Hour Animation Contest, over on BricksInMotion.com).
I know - light flicker. It's not something I can solve very easily right now, so we'll all have to learn to get along with it. If I fuss about it too much, I won't get any videos made, and we don't want that now do we?
At the time, I was just about to move my studio setup from one side of my room to the other, because of space issues (which I still suffer from), and this was the last thing I ever animated in that old setup. Believe it or not, this was right in front of a window; thin blinds and a layer of black [insert name of mysterious fabric here] were all that stood between my animations and sunlight. Probably the worst idea for a studio location ever.
You'll notice the minifigs are all flesh-tone - I hadn't used any of those faces for anything other than the sets they came from (e.g. the wizard's face is from a Pirates of the Carribean set) so I wanted to see how they looked used for my own made-up characters. They work well, although the nostalgic voice in the back of my head says yellow will always be the colour of LEGO. Sorry, Jack Sparrow.
Nerd note: the face for the dwarf is the LEGO General Zod face, hence the heat vision. It's a really nerdy joke. Sometimes I just start drowning in my own geekery.
On January 1st (or thereabouts) I'll be uploading a 2013 Test Compilation, and then in 2014 I'll be uploading videos more regularly (I promise, this time!). I've already started working on a whole bunch of things (some scripted, some partially animated) and I'm still trying to re-edit Istari Halloween so that it's vaguely viewable. This video here, this dwarfy thing, is just to wet your appetite in the meantime.
So it had its faults, and there were lots of unnecessary add-ons courtesy of "Middle-Earth According To Peter Jackson", and it suffered from a severe case of middle-movie-syndrome, but The Desolation of Smaug was a hell of ride.
It was an improvement on the last one, for sure, sorting out most of its pacing issues and ditching unnecessary cutesy moments (Sebastian the hedgehog is nowhere in sight, deep breath out). Though the add-ons made a few of the characters - both those from the book and those invented for the film (cough cough, Tauriel) fall-flat, it was still as engaging and investing as I thought it would be.
Oh, and there's Smaug. Now THAT'S a dragon. Sorry, Hungarian Horntail, but Smaug really sets the bar in terms of reptilian, fire-breathing epicosity.
Benedict Cumberbatch's voice-over is also incredible, though I wouldn't expect anything voiced by him not to sound incredible. His first scene, with Bilbo, was incredibly tense and well-framed.
Wow. Much Smaug. So desolate.
All in all, this was a pleasure to watch. Still not as good as The Lord of the Rings, but getting there.
A word of warning, though, which is that New Line are clearly trying to subtly set up a Silmarillion movie. Make of that what you will, but I'm not convinced that doing so would be a good idea...
In Chima, two wolves find out the hard way that if a skunk does its thing anywhere near your clothes, no amount of soap and water is getting that stink out.
The first in what may be a series of really short Chima videos. It depends.
I did this on and off over the course of, well, today (in between college revision and beating the Elite Four - my starter was Chespin, btw), and guess what? No light flicker! I’ve finally got it all sorted out. So you can now expect more animations. Well, hopefully some half-decent ones at least.
As for Istari Halloween…you may have noticed it’s now November 3rd. Due to problems and more problems, I only have some of it shot, and I’ve had to take the sets apart for another, super-secret project. But never fear! I’m looking at the footage to see if I can rewrite it a little bit and upload what I have into a coherent story. Obviously, it’ll be a lot later than Halloween, but bear with me folks. What else d’you expect from a procrastinating teenager?
In a post-apocalyptic future, two young boys are inspired to dig for treasure in the desert. They find a lot more than they bargained for...
There's a bit of annoying light flicker and camera shake, and the aspect ratio is completely wrong, but overall I'm glad with how this turned out.
This is my practical coursework for my A2 Film Studies course. The brief was that we had to make a 3 to 5 minute short film, but it could be any genre. I actually started off doing a short about air pollution, but that didn't work, and neither did my next film diea that was going to be about shadows and stuff, but I'm glad I ended up making this. I think my teachers were all pleased that I did a stop-motion, since it's vastly different to what other students were doing.
The music (Thunder Dreams, Swimmey Texture, Space Explorers and Impact Allegretto) is all by the amazing Kevin Macleod, and you can see his website here: http://incompetech.com/
Subscribe for more videos! Next one should be out around Halloween...
I want to get into the habit of making more animations, so I'm starting with another Middle-earth video this Halloween! It should be up just before October 31st, though I guess there's no harm if it has to wait untilt he day itself. You never know, you might get two Halloween videos...
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.
