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Resources section maintained by Lord_Of_The_LEGO.
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Preparing for Brickfilming - by Philip Heinrich -- A basic outline of what you'll need to get up and running when picking up brickfilming as a hobby. |
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Frames Per Second - by Hali -- A quick article explaining the vital concept of Frames Per Second. |
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Which Camera is Best for You? - by Stefan -- What camera should you use? Many, if not all, aspiring brickfilmers are faced with this question. This article provides explanations and examples so beginning brickfilmers can decide which is best for them. |
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Stop Motion Primer - by Thomas Foote -- So you want to try stop-Motion animation, preferably with LEGO. Maybe you have a few of the things you need to get started already. Maybe you're just looking to see what it's like. Thomas Foote shares what he's learned and his opinions. |
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Types of Shots - An explanation of the different types of shots filmmakers use to develop their film. |
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Animating a Minifig Walking - by Hali -- One of the hardest things to animate (and one of the first things we all need to do) is learning to make a minifig walk realistically. This article provides four examples of minifig movement, from the way a lot of people start out to an easy way to make a minifig run. |
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How to Animate Dialogue - by Bert Loos -- A guide on how to sync minifig animation to recorded dialog. Very useful for scenes with lots of talking. |
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Facial Animation With Almost No Post-Production - by Super Cameraman -- Digital faces look great if you do them right. The problem with digital faces is that they are so easy to mess up. With this tutorial you will learn how to use non-digital techniques to animate dialog mouth movement. |
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LEGO Camera Base for the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 - by Nathan Wells -- A short tutorial with reference images for a LEGO base that tightly holds a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 webcam in place. THIS ARTICLE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION. |
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LEGO Camera Base for the Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000 - by James Maduzia -- A short tutorial with building instructions for a LEGO base that tightly holds a Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000 webcam in place. One of the most commonly-built bases used for brickfilming. |
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LEGO Base for Kodak DVC325 Webcam - by Hali -- A short tutorial with building instructions for a LEGO base that tightly holds a Kodak DVC325 webcam in place. |
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Audio Guide for Stop-Motion - by Lowweek -- An excellent guide to recording and using audio in your films, the equipment involved, the setup, etc. Note: Link opens up a PDF. |
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Radio Transmission Sound Effect in Audacity - by Si665 -- Learn how to make dialog sound like a radio transmission with this quick tutorial. |
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Hints for Lighting - by Hali -- How beginners can improve their lighting without buying expensive equipment. |
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A Guide To Lighting - by Logan -- A guide that focuses on how to get nice, consistent lighting, and how to avoid the dreaded light flicker that plagues almost all beginners. |
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Videomach Tutorial - by Smash_lizard -- VideoMach can be a very confusing piece of software, especially to those who have never used it before. This is tutorial which should help those who are confused, frustrated, or have no clue what to do. |
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Widescreen & Letterbox in VirtualDub - by Kyle Prohaska -- A tutorial that covers how to convert footage to widescreen or to letterbox it using VirtualDub. |
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Axogon Composer Basics - by Thomas Foote The biggest drawback of Axogon Composer is it's very steep learning curve. Thomas created this simple tutorial to get you familiar with the organization and capabilities of this powerful program. |
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Lightsabers in Axogon Composer. - by Philip Heinrich -- A guide on creating Star Wars style lightsaber effects using Axogon Composer. |
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Chroma Keying in Axogon Composer - by Philip Heinrich -- A guide on blue/green screening using Axogon Composer. |
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Digital Crowds in Axogon Composer - by Smeagol Studios ""If you have a massive crowd scene, with dozens, or even hundreds of mini-figs, then you know that it would be impossible to get enough mini-figs to film the scene, especially if they are all identical, or need to look similar. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary to make them on the computer." " |
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CGI Bricks - by Smeagol Studios "A guide on creating/converting 3D rendered LEGO, and using CGI in your Brickfilms." |
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BSOL Tutorial - By Stefan "A tutorial demonstrating the basic uses of BSOL" |
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How To Animate A Muzzle Flare - By Buxton of Oblong Pictures "A few people have asked how I did this effect in The Brick Gulch Chronicles. It's not difficult, but it is very time consuming and tedious. There's probably faster and easier ways of doing it but I'm no Photoshop expert and I just go with what I know. |
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Wire Removal in Photoshop - By Kyle Prohaska "First of all Special Thanks to Digital Dave for permission of the images in this tutorial. Digital Dave used these images and this technique in his film "The Customer is Always Right." This tutorial will show you how to do this in Photoshop step by step..." |
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Picture in a Picture in Wax 2.0e - By Kyle Prohaska "There's alot of free compositing tools out there but Wax 2.0e seems to be the easiest to get ahold of.There is a downside to this program however, the quality of certain things is great, while others are extremely cheesy. I'll steer clear of the cheese and show you the basic usage of this program to pull of a simple Picture In Picture look that you see commonly on News programs..." |
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Muzzle Flashes in Wax 2.0e - By Kyle Prohaska "One of the top FX questions other than Chroma key is how to create some great muzzle flashes like in the movies. I'm going to take you through the steps for doing a single muzzle flash..." |
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Creating Effective Special Effects - By Nick Durron "A good article that gets you thinking about FX and how they should be shot and what options you have" |
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Face Expressions in Photoshop - By KG "A good tutorial for animating facial movements" |
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Proton Stream in After Effects - "Create that popular Ghostbusters effect you see in the movies." |
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Force Lightning in After Effects - Daniel Broadway |
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H.264 Compression in VLC - by Kyle Prohaska -- Using VLC, there is simple easy way to compress to H264 .mov Quicktime native files that are accurately sized. This tutorial shows you how. |
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H.264 Compression in Quicktime Pro - by Kyle Prohaska -- A tutorial on how to encode your movies into H264 format using Quicktime Pro. |
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Guide to Codecs - by Nate Burr -- This tutorial covers the various kinds of Codecs, what a Codec actually is, and what they are used for, as well as which ones are better suited for the brickfilming hobby. |
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Archive.org Basics - by Matthew -- A brief tutorial on how to use Archive.org. |
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Setting Up a Dolly Track - by Si665 -- With this tutorial you will learn how to set up the perfect dolly track for your camera with a LEGO base, enabling you to animation very smooth dolly shots. |
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Mutilating Minifigs - by Doug James -- A tutorial on how to modify LEGO minifigures for extra-gory battle scenes. Not for purists. |
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Guide to Playback of Brickfilms - by Nate Burr -- This guide is intended to provide some help for not only playing the many fine films you'll find through this site, but also to help you should you have difficulty in getting a brickfilm to play. |
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MotionMage - FREE - A utility designed for stop motion animation capture and editing. Features include: full camera setting controls, auto-averaging picture smoothing, onion-skin and strobe and disaster recovery. Frames are saved to a directory when taken, and automatically moved to a trash directory when cut or deleted. Barring a hard-disk crash, you cannot lose a single frame of animation unless you specifically delete it by emptying the trash. MotionMage is written in Java, and it uses the Java Media Framework for video functions. This means that it works with both Windows and Unix/Linux systems. |
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BTV Pro - - Video capture, editing and animation shareware for the Macintosh. It has a 15 day free-use grace period. Features include: movie playback and editing, stop-motion animation, frame averaging, movie export, DV input/output, DV device control. |
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I Can Animate - A stop motion creation package for Mac OSX. It works with multiple video layers, in effect giving you the ability to photo retouch your video. Draw directly onto your video frames for special effects, or remove support rods or strings. The drawing layer sits on top of the video layer so that you can retouch the images you have captured without changing the video images themselves. It also includes chroma key support and multi level onion skinning. |
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Celtx - FREE - Professional screenwriting program, works on all platforms. (OSX, Windows, Linux, etc.) |
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Anasazi Stop Motion Animator - FREE - Also known as SMA, this little program is a very simple and easy tool for capturing animation. Onion skinning is also included. |
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MonkeyJam - FREE - Although it is designed for pencil and paper, MonkeyJam can also be used for Stop Motion animation and has several features just for that. It now supports importing sound files, which means timing your animation to dialog just got easier. |
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Stop Motion Pro - A very, very good piece of capture software. Includes features like: record and synchronize audio to your animation, export animation as MPEG, multiple color and shape markers to make tracking animation easy, up to 50 levels of onion skinning, frame averaging, and programmable shortcut keys for virtually every function. |
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iStopMotion - - A stop motion animation and time lapse capture tool for Mac OS X. Based entirely on modern Mac OS X features, it offers a high level of functionality. Has a 5-day free use grace period. |
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AnimatorDV Simple - FREE - Tool that supports Betacam SP/SDI, DV, Digital Still Cameras, scanners, other TWAIN devices, analog (WDM) and webcams, all with onion skin mode. Recently, the Simple+ version has become free for download on the AnimatorDV website (ignore the commercial use link). |
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FrameThief - - A shareware package for creating animation on the Macintosh platform. Grace period unknown. |
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VideoMach - deceptively powerful. Assemble clips, break your video files down into JPG's or BMP's for individual frame editing and the reassemble them into a video file, trim out that pesky frame where you accidentally took a shot of your thumb, Crop, resize, apply filters, audio editing is included aswell (not great, but useable), convert between file formats, make thumbnails for your webpage. a very useful piece of software. |
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MediaEdit Pro 2 - "Designed specifically for moviemakers, amateur photographers and new creative artists, MediaEdit Pro will show you the world of movie and picture magic and help create professional looking, impressive movie projects. It includes several unique features not found in any other product. This is not your traditional hard to use movie editing environment. |
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DDclip - "A professional, non-linear, non-destructive, multitrack, real-time audio and video editor for Windows. It allows you to process and mix up to 32 high-quality audio tracks (24 bit/96 kHz is available) with real-time audio effects (including any DirectX plug-ins) on PC with any Windows-compatible sound card." |
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DDclip free 2.23 - DDClip Free 2.23 is the most restricted package of DDClip with minimal set of features. The difference between the pro and free version can be seen here |
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Windows Movie Maker 2 - An update of WMM that came with Windows XP, supposedly a vast improvement. And it's free. |
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VirtualDub - VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. |
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Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 - Slightly watered down version of its big brother Premiere Pro (now CS3), Premiere Elements provides basic editing and stability for a great price. If your looking for a product to edit with thats relatively inexpensive this is definetly worth a look. Its only $100 and with what you get its worth it. |
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Vegas Movie Studio - Sony Vegas is widely becoming the editing program of choice among alot of indie filmmakers. The interface seems to be what people like about it and its price is unbeatable. This package also comes with DVD Authoring software for DVD menu creation, animating, adding buttons, etc. If you are a Brickfilmer who wants alot of features, and doesn't have alot of dough this is THE choice for you. (its only $80) If you already own an Adobe Product or two, Premiere Pro or Elements is a better choice for the integration between them. |
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Audacity - FREE - A free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using cut, copy and paste (with unlimited undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Bass Boost, Wahwah, and Noise Removal. |
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GoldWave - A very flexible digital audio editor. Features include: play, edit, mix, and analyze audio, apply special effects such as fade, equalizer, Doppler, mechanize, echo, reverse, flanger, and more noise reduction and pop/click filters. Make perfect digital copies of audio CD tracks using the CD Reader tool and save them in MP3, WMA, or Vorbis files View a variety of real-time visuals and VU meters Convert files to/from different formats, such as wav, mp3, ogg, iff, au, vox and even raw binary data. Not free, but there is a demo version available. |
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Jasmine Audio - An audio editor, mixer, and file converter for Macintosh. Convert multiple audio file types including MP3, WAV, AIFF, QuickTime, MP4 (AAC), AVI, µLAW, System 7, 3G. Change pitch/tempo: Speed up or slow down your music without changing the pitch. Or modify the pitch without changing the tempo. Overdub recording: Record a new track while one or more tracks play. MultiLevel Undo/Redo, and MultiTrack capabilities. |
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Axogon Composer - FREE Creates many different kinds of effects including lightsabers, chroma key, rotoscoping, etc. NOTE: Link opens download of exe file. |
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BSOL (Blue Screen of Life) - FREE - A bluescreening/masking program designed and written by Stefan. Contrary to its name, it is far more useful in masking applications than it is in true bluescreening. You can find a tutorial here |
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Adobe After Effects - A powerful yet extremely costly piece of equipment, Adobe After Effects creates high-quality motion graphics and visual effects. It is highly recommend if you have the cash for it. However, it should be noted that it possesses a rather large learning curve, and may take some messing with to get a feel for it. |
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Sqirlz Water Reflections - FREE -- A simple program that creates bodies of water, rain and snow for your images. You can change the color of the water and you can also make ripples for rain. You can also change how fast and how many drops or flakes of snow and rain there is, plus other settings like the opacity and the direction. |
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Wax 2.0e - FREE - A relatively unknown program but provides some easy alternatives to certain effects. |
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EffectsLab Pro - This program is designed with live action home movies in mind, and as such not all of the effects look right when stuck in a brickfilm with plastic, primary-colored actors. The"hey cool look what I can do" factor of this program often leads to abuse of its power and many dozens of dull "no plot just another effects test" films. So if you choose to use, please do so responsibly. |
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RealAnime - FREE A graphical user interface that converts big files into smaller files using state-of-the-art codecs. Settings are set once and used on all files. Profiles are avalible to use different settings on different sources. RealAnime also supports filtering to improve quality on bad sources. |
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Real Producer - FREE - A very efficient encoder that compresses videos to the RealMedia format. |
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Media Convert - FREE - An online media converter that supports a broad variety of input and output filetypes for video, audio, image, and text files (NOTE: You can only convert files up to 150 MB in size). Not only that, you can also convert movie files that play directly off the Internet (e.g.: YouTube, Google Video, etc.) as well as take screenshots of websites. |
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Xvid codec - FREE - XviD is an ISO MPEG-4 compliant video codec, designed to compress/decompress digital video. It's a open source project, which is developed and maintained by a handful of skilled and interested engineers from all over the world. |
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DivX - FREE - One of the most widely used and popular video codecs on the web. |
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MediaCoder - FREE - An open source media converter that allows you to encode in a wide variety of audio and video formats. Not only that, but it can also convert to portable video player formats and rip audio and video discs. |
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Quicktime Pro - A compression program used by professionals in the industry for Quicktime Compression and carries a price tag of a mere $30. |
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MPEGstreamclip - FREE - A conversion and encoding tool for Mac and PC users. If you can't afford any programs but want to have a great compression tool for AVI's, MOV's, etc. then this is the program for you. Very useful for converting certain MPEG files and such that editors might not like. |
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Windows Media Encoder - FREE - Windows Media Encoder allows users to compress their films in Windows Media format, and is a strong alternative to using the WMV compression in Windows Movie Maker. |
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SmartFTP - FREE -- A free FTP (file transfer protocol) client program that can be used to upload brickfilms and other files to websites. |
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FTP Surfer - FREE -- A free FTP (file transfer protocol) client program that can be used to upload brickfilms and other files to websites. |
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FPS Calculator - Built By our very own FAQ moderator, MrGraff, This little tool Takes the Hard work, and Brain strain out of calculating the timing you need for synchronizing an animation to existing audio. |
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VideoInspector - A tool designed to provide you with as much information as possible about your video files. With VideoInspector you'll know why your video files has no sound or refuses to play correctly. VideoInspector will help you installing the required CoDecs (coder/decoder software) for an optimal performance. VideoInspector can also inspect your system to find which codecs are available, and it can also process multiple video files and export its result in HTML or plain text files. |
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GSpot - Much in the same vein as Video Toolbox (above)GSpot Establishes what video codecs (audio and video) are required to play an AVI file. it can Determine whether these codecs are installed on your system. |
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The GIMP - The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. |
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Super - FREE - A compression and file conversion software. Interface is simple and it can convert almost anything under the sun into a new format. |
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Doug Vandegrift - by Nathan Wells -- Nathan interviews Doug Vandegrift, also known as "cannedgravy," the creator of the dramatic and comedic brickfilm America: Outlawed. |
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Jay Silver - by Jason -- Jason interviews Jay Silver, considered to be one of the early brickfilmers. His dedication to production values and high quality of his work command the respect and awe of many. |
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Tim Drange and Tony Mines - by Jason -- Jason interviews Tim Drange and Tony Mines of Spite Your Face Productions, professional animators who were hired by the one and only LEGO Company to show off their LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Spiderman sets. |
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James Maduzia - by Kyle Prohaska -- Kyle Prohaska interviews James Maduzia, the creator of the film The Letter and Zero Gravity Rebellion. Though these are the only two brickfilms James ever made, they are both considered classics today. |
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Marc Atkin - by Jason -- Jason interviews Marc Atkin, the director of 2001: A LEGO Odyssey, a tribute to Stanley Kubrick's work of similar name. It is now considered one of the classics of brickfilming. |
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Egoless - by Jason -- Jason interviews Ben of Egoless Productions, an animator who produced some very polished religiously-themed brickfilms. |
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4096 - by Kyle Prohaska -- Kyle Prohaska inteviews 4096, the creator of Rocketmen vs. Robots, one of the better well-known CGI brickfilm series. |
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StopMotionAnimation.com - A community-based site focused on stop motion in general, usually leaning more toward the more common latex/clay armature-based puppets. A few professional animators frequent the forums too. |
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The Brickfilms WIKI - The brickfilming version of Wikipedia. The goal of this project is to create the most comprehensive resource ever available on brickfilming. Users may contribute their own articles and edit current entries. |
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IMDB - The Internet Movie Database. Need to find out who directed, wrote, starred in, what the plot was, comments, reviews, ratings, or discuss just about any movie? You can do it all here. |
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Animation Magazine - An online magazine dealing with the technology and art of animation in all forms. |
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YouTube - A humongous worldwide digital video repository filled with just about every video seen on TV, the internet, and then some. This is a great and commonly used resource for uploading your films if you lack webspace. |
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Archive.org - A good alternative to Brickshelf for hosting your Brickfilms for those Brickfilmers who do not have the resources and money for a paid host. |
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LEGO.com - and shop@Home - The LEGO official site and online store. |
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Peeron - Very useful LEGO set inventory database. Also includes pictures of nearly every single LEGO part, and also a LEGO color chart. |
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Bricklink - A venue for individuals and businesses from all around the world to buy and sell new, and used LEGO through fixed price and auction services. |
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Brickset - A nearly-complete LEGO set database. |
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LDraw - A CAD system designed by and for LEGO enthusiasts. |
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LUGNET - Global community of LEGO enthusiasts. LUGNET unites LEGO fans worldwide through discussion groups, web pages, and services. Home to thousands of LEGO fans of all ages. |
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BrickArms - An online store where you can buy custom weapons, weapons packs, and custom minifigs. Features a wide selection of firearms and other war accessories that fit perfectly with LEGO minifigs. |
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Flickr - A very professional Web 2.0 image-hosting site that offers both free and cheap image hosting packages. The free package limits the number of photos uploaded a month, but the very cheap Pro package allows unlimited uploading. A very popular site with LEGO fans, many of which have migrated from the somewhat flawed Brickshelf. Highly recommended. |
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Brickshelf - A place to upload any of your LEGO-related content. While you technically can store your brickfilms here, it's not recommended, the bandwidth requirements of media files often cause the Brickshelf admins to randomly and suddenly disable downloads of media with no warning. |
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Maj.com - For all your non-LEGO-related images, Maj.com a free image sharing center similar to Brickshelf. |
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SoundDogs.com - Hundreds of thousands of sound files. You need a particular, specific, sound effect? some Royalty Free Music? Samples and Loops? Vocals ? chances are you'll find it here. Searchable by category, very handy. |
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Findsounds - Another fantastic audio finding resource... it's kind of like Google for sound files, and nothing but sound files. This place has saved me from headaches and hassles dozens of times. |
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Brickfilms Sound Library - A Community built resource, The Brickfilms Sound Library, where you can find sound effects and music to use in your films. This collection has been brought together by community members with great care to ensure top quality. Perhaps most importantly, these sounds can be used in your films for free |
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Soundstorm Sound effects library - Here you can explore and purchase from a selection of sound effects from Soundstorm, the award winning sound editorial house |
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Bargus Sound Library - An online sound library specifically catering for film. Bargus also offers a service which allows other filmmakers to request sound clips to be recorded for free and added to the sound library, they can then download the clips and use them in their films. |
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Chris Worth Productions - This Royalty Free collection features dozens of good, though notably expensive, musical tracks, compilations, and loops. They also take custom music commissions for any project in any musical style or format. |
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Cynicism of the LEGO Studios Steven Spielberg MovieMaker Set - By Jared B. Gilbert "Jared Takes a cold, hard look at the flaws of the set that introduced a great many people to the idea of stopmotion films made with LEGO. It is widely agreed that this set is a great idea, poorly executed." |
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