Brickfilms Interviews: Jay Silver by Jason
Jay Silver is the creator of The Gauntlet, a short film set to the song "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. This film just missed the deadline for our Classical Movie Contest, but was arguably one of the better films we have seen recently. The combination of lighting, special effects, smooth movement and a brief story that flows very well makes this a textbook example of quality brick animation. We interviewed Jay recently and he shared his thoughts with us about making films with LEGO bricks and gave us a brilliant behind the scenes look at his movie.
How old are you, where are you from, and what do you do when not making LEGO films?
I'm 27 and from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, which is the peninsula
that sticks out on the eastern side right above Maine.
It's a bit famous as the site of the largest
man-made non-nuclear explosion ever. When I'm not making Lego films
(which is too often for my taste) I'm a production artist/designer at
an advertising agency. I also draw and color comics when I can find
the time and make obsessively accurate Halloween costumes.
Have you ever worked on another type of film, or was this your first foray into film-making?
I've made a few Lego shorts before but nothing anywhere near as elaborate or complicated as The Gauntlet. I can't post them because I don't have the space but I'm looking into it. Other than that, I've been in a commercial for my local comic shop (had a bit of creative input there) and once served as gofer for a video done by the agency.
Let's talk a bit about The Gauntlet. By all accounts a superb short. How did the idea for this come about?
Thank you. It was pretty straightforward, really. I was, as fellow animator Doug James put it, a "lurker" on Brickfilms until I noticed the contest page one day (someone had sent me the link for just the film directory months before and I had been too lazy to explore any of the other pages) and realized that I still had time to make the deadline. It's absolutely true that I might never have made anything worth posting if it wasn't for the contest.
So I knew I wanted to do something but didn't have a whole lot of time. I needed a song that worked well and wasn't far over the 2:00 limit. I settled on "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (later mis-naming it as simply "Hall of the Mountain King" in the credits) which has always been a favorite; very exciting and catchy. And it was an instant story; I had heard years ago that it was an instrumental telling of an old legend about a slave escaping and being chased by giant stone golems. I don't know if it's true (about the song, not the legend) or not but it seemed pretty do-able (very few props, no crowds, etc.) and worked out all right in the end.
Your animation throughout is excellent, but especially the giant stone statue. Can you explain that armature a bit?
Originally I had thought of doing two that were about 1/2 the size
but realized it would just be making the project 
unnecessarily
complicated. I like the feverish pace in the supposed legend and the
song as the slave is being assaulted from all sides but decided that
a single, huge, unstoppable behemoth would fit in fine instead. It just
had to be big.
I built it to have the same range of motion as a minifig so it would "fit" in the same world. The hardest part of construction was the shoulder: I needed something that I could rotate in fairly small amounts (so the animation wouldn't be too chunky) and that I could lock into place for the shot. The final solution was interlocking Technic gears. The only thing it does that a minifig can't is move its fingers. I wanted it to be able to make a good-looking grab for the little guy's head.
The golem's head was originally built hollow. I wanted the thing to
be essentially faceless (and so a little more foreboding) but for its
glowing red eyes. Unfortunately that made the head a bit too fragile
and after I crushed it a few times I filled it in and left it that way.
It ended up being a happy accident that they catch the light when the
thing's head turns and I felt that got the effect across well enough
anyway. (I did the bit where its eyes glow near the end of the shoot
and did it as I had expected to - hollow, with a keychain light inside.)
Construction was the easy part. At the longest part of its stride the thing won't stand up on its own and I almost when crazy trying to a) hold it up, b) hold it steady (I have my camera set to average twenty video frames for every captured frame and it takes a little while), and c) to not cast shadows or have my hand in the way. In some shots there's a big wad of Silly Putty under its feet. Eventually I discovered that a certain Lego piece, stuck in a certain way under one of the feet, would keep everything happy. I almost cried. More than once I had leaned over to hit 'Capture Frame' while holding it and moved it out of position or knocked it over or worse. One time I had taken too long messing with the camera or the minifig or something and it pulled out of the Silly Putty and took out a wall, the minifig and lost an arm before I even knew what was going on. (That scene is still in there although I'm not sure which it is. It took an eternity of comparisons between the current video picture and the last captured frame to get it all matched up but I refused to start all over again.)
In retrospect, I notice that you really don't see much of the thing after the introduction other than its feet. I had originally intended for the shot where it almost catches the slave at the door to be shot from his perspective and now I sort of wish I had.
Another nice thing about this film is the use of light, from the opening shot with the light streaming in the window to the colored balls of magical light. Obviously some of this is real light and some of it computer generated. How did you create your sets to use this light?
The lighting was, hands down, the hardest thing to do. The only upshot to it is that it made an immensely positive impact on the look and feel. Having it be so dark with a few contrasting areas of light really helped make it more dramatic.
The sets were constructed to be as open as possible. In many cases
they ended only slightly off-camera (as much do to 
with
a tight LEGO supply as anything else). This meant I could put lights
pretty much anywhere I wanted without getting bizarre shadows. The most
I ever had going at once was three, I think. Occasionally the camera
would present a problem since, as with most webcams, the case is much
larger than the actual lens and would get in the way. Very often the
partial ceilings would cast a hard shadow over
part of the set and I'd have to try and soften or hide it. A few situations
that
stand out in memory:
I tried and tried to make a beam of light shine through the window in that early scene but it just wouldn't work without a really strong light (which meant spillover either through the cracks in the wall or off my ceiling and into the set) and something like mist or dust in the air. So I made a beam in Photoshop and pasted it in After Effects. I faded it in and out slightly to make it look like clouds moving outside.
Another was when the green thingys come around the corner and swoop
over the camera. I really believe that an audience will know most of
what's what when they watch a movie and it's important to try and blur
the line between reality and effect. So I did this ballet with three
lights (not just one pointed straight down because there's a ceiling
in there) to move a spot of light around the corner and down the hall
for the actual shoot and then stuck the green thingys on later, making
them move around and grow bigger
as they get closer. It really looks like they're in there and having
a physical effect on the hallway - not just pasted on. I'm really happy
with how it turned out.
And for the computer generated effects? Could you take us through
a quasi-technical walkthrough of how you did the green orbs?
The
green orbs could have been done a few different ways but in the end
I chose to make them by putting colored lens flares on transparent
layers over the scene. I gave me the flexibility to change their size,
brightness and position over time with relative ease. After Effects has
a handy (sometimes) feature where you can set keyframes and it will
calculate the steps in any of the parameters for the intervening frames
automatically. That's pretty much it.
This feature was not so handy when I did the chandelier (the lights are the same as the orbs, just small and yellow) because I had to match up each light to its spot each frame or they would 'drift' in the time between keyframes. It's hard to explain, but it's annoying.
A wonderful moment in the film was when the main character sees a statue and reacts to it with surprise. The camera angles there did it all. Do you have any advice as to how to achieve these effects?
I'm glad you liked it. It's remarkable (I think) that the movie almost always gets the same reactions in the same places from very different people. They fade out toward the end of the chandelier bit, they laugh out loud when he throws the stick and chuckle when he skids around the corner. The only part that seems to ever be different is the statue surprise. I had intended it to be the real laugh in the movie but I think most people are still trying to decide if the movie's supposed to be serious or cute when it comes and it just doesn't grab them.
The camera angles are, in my opinion, the strongest thing about the
movie. I find that most of the LEGO movies I see are shot from a single,
high camera position. Unless you've got something REALLY fascinating
going on, the viewer is going to feel 
very
detached and lose interest. Bringing the camera down to the minifig's
level makes a huge difference. It makes you feel more involved, like
a real film. You aren't just watching little toys anymore - they're
as tall as you are. [JR. - This is an excellent point. If you take nothing
else out of this interview, remember this.]
Varying the angles plays up the drama of a particular scene. With the statue bit, I wanted us to know that something was watching the slave wandering around, but to also share his confusion as to who or what it was. It looked like another person but it's hard to tell in the shadows. It's not moving... and then he freaks out! What is he seeing? He he seeing something we didn't? It that person attacking him? But then a big, wide shot to show it all in bright light: he's just scared himself over a statue. But still it watches him...
After I shot it I messed around with the frames - doubling some and taking some out - to get the timing right. I found it tricky to get his reaction to be knee-jerk fast and his relaxation to be that sort of twitchy, halting, only-missed-me-by-inches sort of relaxation. It's still not where I want it but it's better than it was.
I did some very rough storyboards for The Gauntlet and visualized it
as I would a live-action movie. I wondered about how 
the
action moved through a scene and where to put the camera to get the
maximum effect without overdoing it. I'm sure I unconciously ripped
off any number of of films doing it, too. There's one bit I find particularly
suspicious: where the slave is walking down the hallway in the background,
behind a lion head decoration. I just can't think of what film I would
have gotten that from but I'm sure it's from somewhere. [JR - I know
it appears in opening cinematic of the game Planescape: Torment but
I'm not sure where else.]
I wish I could do things like raising/lowering the camera or changing focus in mid-scene. I'm REALLY jealous of how well it was done for The Military Tattoo at Brickingham Palace. Very cinematic.
Last Gauntlet question. What did you use to film? To capture? To edit?
I used an iBot webcam from Orange Micro, connected to a Mac G3. It has a good little detachable 'foot' that is actually pretty useful. You can put a little sandbag on it to keep the camera steady, hang the camera up somewhere or take the thing right off. My biggest complaint would have to be the unsteady focus ring, which has a tendency to unfocus and drift as soon as you let go.
My capture software was BTV Edit, which seems to be undergoing an upgrade.
The old version can be a bit wonky but I suspect it might be my machine
as well. I've got a new computer coming soon so we'll see. 
My editing software was split between Photoshop and After Effects, with QuickTime Pro thrown in for making 'dailies'. Photoshop for image editing (including the huge task of taking out color casts and controlling the brightness/contrast) and Affter Effects for the final compilation of hundreds of images, layering, fades, sound, most digital effects and so on.
So what's next? Are you working on anything else right now?
I'd like to get in on the new Historical Fiction Contest but I'd also
like to have something for Brickswest 2002 and a film festival seeking
Star Wars entries.* However, right now I'm on the verge of biting off
more than I can chew already. I'm just a few days away from finishing
the script/storyboards for an ambitious pirate movie and I'm getting
really anxious to start in on it. I won't give the story away but I
will say that it should come in just under ten minutes, feature full
dialogue and sound and have waaaaay
more complicated effects than The Gauntlet.
(*and he DID "Star Wars Episode III: Rise of the Empire", and it was FANTASTIC, infact it This film won the audience choice award for BrickFest 2002 animation competition. and is widely regarded as one of the best brickfilms out there - Nate)
What do you like about the LEGO film-making community? What can we improve upon?
I really like how there's enough of us to keep new things popping up
on a fairly regular basis, and I like the rather friendly spirit of
competition. I could do without the post after post of trash talk that
goes along with that, but I usually just ignore it.
I think there's a lot of enthusiasm in the people who come here and that there are a lot of good ideas floating just below the surface. I think (hope!) we'll start to see those more often, and that movie creators take the time to make a really nice job of it. I like movies with good cinematography, pacing, and (a pet peeve of mine): a nice title or intro/credit sequence. (They are often very blah, non-existent or take up half of the movie, wasting time and hard drive space. Twelve Bucks & All of the Dead come to mind as happy exceptions.)
I think the Director's Projects are really great ideas and the last contest was a lot of fun.
