Brickfilms Interviews: Tim Drage and Tony Mines by Jason
Tim Drage and Tony Mines are the cofounders of Spite Your Face Productions, an independent film company in Newport, South Wales (part of her Majesty's United Kingdom for those of you a bit slow). Tim and Tony are both known on Brickfilms for their wonderful shorts: ONE: A Space Odyssey and All Of The Dead. We pestered the duo every few days until they finally answered all of our questions.
(Since this interview was written
many more fantastic lego related things have gone on at SYF,
including being hired by the LEGO group themselves to produce things
like Monty
Python and the Holy Grail in LEGO,(in conjunction with Python (Monty)
Pictures, commissioned for inclusion on the lovely special edition Monty
Python and the Holy Grail DVD release)
Spiderman, Scary Thriller,and the ever amusing Star Wars: The Han Solo
Affair) - Nate
Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from? How old are
you? What do you for a living to afford expensive editing equipment?
Tim:
I'm 23, and am from Newcastle (in the North East of England). I don't
have a Geordie accent though, which puzzles most people. I'm now in
horrible Newport in South Wales, where Tony and I studied Animation
at the
'University of Wales College Newport'. Most of our equipment was purchased
with student loans to make up for our college's lack of decent facilities!
But now we have graduated, and some good paid animation commissions
are in the works!
Tony:
My name is Tony. I'm a 34 Leg, 32 waist. I come originally from the
womb of Mrs Anne Mines, but expanded my living space during my first
year to a small corner of the English speaking world called Leighton
Buzzard, a town famous for the great train robbery, Bob Monkhouse, and
having a stupid name. You can all wish me a happy 23rd birthday on the
eighth of July, or send me money. In fact no. Just send me money.
Ask strangers to send me money. No. Spite Your Face Productions (SYF) is what we do for a living. Its an independent film and animation company set up by myself and Tim to showcase and distribute our own work and the work of a select few close associates. We work on a commission basis and do everything from short films to music videos, live action or animated. At the moment most of our equipment is either stolen from the homeless, or built from scratch in our Korean sweat shop. But with a few big contracts in the pipeline we are soon going to have a lot of new professional stuff.
How is Spite Your Face productions coming? Any projects in the pipeline?
Tim:
Things are going well! After a false start which many of you probably
read about on the discussion board, we managed to sort out permission
from Lego to show 'ONE' at festivals... it's had a few high profile
screenings so far, and has led to some proper animation work for us!
So we're happy! 
Tony:
ONE: A Space Odyssey has gathered an alarming amount of kudos for the
company very quickly and has led to some new contracts and a lot of
new opportunities. We can't expand on that for legal reasons. Aside
from the commercial stuff for other people, we also always have our
own projects on the go. We are currently working towards the development
of an idea we have for an animated (ie. cel) featurette. Again, I don't
want to talk about it too much, but when it happens you will know
about it. I am also building a 'Weather Gun'.
How is it to work together on projects? Are there moments of creative difference? Who does what?
Tim:
We both work on most aspects of our filmmaking, although we do specialize
[ed. - that's specialize for us Americans] in certain areas; for example
Tony is better at drawing than me, and does storyboards and the like.
I'm the more stop-motion obsessed, so I do the greater part of that!
There are sometimes minor creative
differences. Long periods spent in a dark room moving tiny models around
can lead to a deranged state of mind in which we argue about incredibly
trivial details which will be completely unnoticeable in the finished
film! But generally we get on well and agree on nearly all animation
issues!
Tony:
Tim is the brains behind the operation, and I'm the brains in front
of the operation. We work very well together because we always balance
each other out. On ONE' for example, there were lots of things that
I was really perfectionist about that Tim couldn't be bothered with,
and there were also things that Tim was really perfectionist about that
I couldn't be bothered with. So between us we made perfection! No, perhaps
not. Argue? We never argue. Balance you see. I tell him to shut up.
He tells me to shut up. No argument.
ONE' is a good example of a SYF film. Our respective personalities come out evenly. My work looks like the work of 'pop culture', but on closer inspection is very very ANTI a lot of what is going on in the commercial field. Tims work is ostensibly just surrealism and anarchy, but on closer inspection owes a lot to pop culture and genre. Neither of us seem to fit individually at either end of the spectrum. I get accused of being too 'art' to be commercial, while Tim is often told he's too 'sci-fi' or too 'pop' to be art. Which of course is cobblers and nonsense. So what we end up with together is something like ONE', a film which stems from our mutual desire to (A) Make deconstructive non-narrative anti-cinema while (B) arsing around with Lego, playing with spaceships, animating prat falls and taking the piss out of Kubrick.
What do you like about brick animation? What do you find frustrating? What other mediums do you work in?
Tim:
Well for a start it's really easy to stop Lego from falling over, which
makes life a lot easier compared to trying to tie down large stop motion
puppets and sets! Really, the main attraction to Lego movie making is
the aesthetic. Minifigs are so cute and iconic that they lend themselves
very well to any kind of parody and subversion. A film being made from
Lego is in most cases almost enough of a joke in itself, especially
if it's a parody of something really unlikely! There are technical drawbacks,
such as the limited movement of minifigs and the tiny scale of
everything which makes focusing difficult, especially when shooting
on film (check out our shameful lack of focus in most of 'All of the
Dead' - we didn't put much effort into measuring the focal distances
on that one!) Thankfully, people don't expect a great deal from a Lego
movie, so if it looks fairly decent people think you're great ;-) !
And of course it's great fun!
I've used all sorts of different media in my previous animated films, but am most interested in stop motion. My work tends to be extremely surreal, so Lego movies are a welcome chance to do something that everyone can understand and follow! It's nice to make something that's amusing and simple from time to time. We do have some ideas for some 2D cartoons, so I'm learning to use Macromedia Flash.
Tony:
Lego is to animation, what Logs are to the falling-over industry. Its
indestructible. It doesn't lose its shape. The men are hinged and stick
to the floor. The colours are bright and even. The audience already
recognize the minifigs as 'people'. Its almost too easy. The only thing
negative I can think of about animating with Lego is the limited movement
and expression of the minifig, but this just presents a challenge. We
work in all the mediums there are, and a few that haven't been invented
yet. My medium of choice is good old drawn animation. I will let
Tim tell you what he does.
If you could have any LEGO set, what would it be?
Tim: 
I would like actual 2001 official Lego to be made, with big sets of
all the scenes and spaceships we didn't have the time or the bricks
to build! In terms of reality, I always vaguely wanted the old Space
Monorail, but it was WAY too expensive!
Tony:
I don't think my ideal Lego set exists. I have always been most into
the historical stuff, like Pirate and Castle, but have always been disappointed
when it gets a bit too colorful and silly. I get annoyed by stuff like
the hang gliders in the Samurai range. What I would like to see is a
new range, but a really realistic educational and historically accurate
one, maybe Roman or something. Or a proper 'Holy Grail' style revamp
of Castle, but without the dragons and witches. Python Lego, that's
what we want. 'Grail' Lego and 'Brian' Lego. It sounds silly when you
put it like that, but I think Lego have a certain responsibility towards
education, and shouldn't go around letting children think that Samurai
hang-glided everywhere. That said, I wouldn't say no to a minifig scale
Super Star Destroyer. [ed. - whaddya think of that, Tony?]
Let's talk about your films a bit. In "All of the Dead", you have a shot where a character is rolling toward some zombies like a bowling ball, and at the same time the soundtrack slows down. Was this a difficult effect?
Tim:
Like most of our best sound design, this happened more or less by chance...
we recorded loads of our own half-baked 'scratching' attempts with suitably
old records, and that bit just fit quite nicely!! That gag is stolen
from Bugs 
Bunny
by the way...there's one cartoon where he's playing baseball, and someone
gets hit by a very fast ball and is hammered into the ground, which
then becomes their grave!
Tony:
I might be wrong, Tim will correct me, but I think that was completely
by accident. Most of our films have at least one instance of the soundtrack
doing something completely amazing by pure coincidence, and I think
this is one of them. To make the All of the Dead soundtrack, we got
a collection of appropriate vinyl and scratched it willy nilly. We then
pieced together the score using the best bits. My favorite instance
of this is on 'meanwhile later' when we pan down to the graveyard and
the record just crawls to a halt.
Can you tell us any other "behind the scenes" info that cannot already be found on your website? ONE, AOTD
Tim:
I can tell you that at one point during the shooting of 'ONE' Tony and
I had been animating for so long that we'd gone quite insane. We took
a short break during which we discovered that a Lego monkey riding a
Lego motorbike was the funniest thing we'd ever seen in our life...
we tried to animate him driving around, but we were in such hysterics
that I couldn't operate the frame capture software properly.
Most actual information we can think of that is useful or interesting is on the 'Making of' pages. Some people don't seem to have read them properly before emailing us, which is perhaps understandable, as they're not exactly the most concise and informative pieces of writing! I think in future we need to take more production photos, as we never seem to have as many as we thought.
One thing a few people have asked about is the Lego Pod model... it's a complex construction and our pictures don't really do it justice. However, I've now added a few views of different segments, which should make it a bit clearer if anyone wants to have a go at making one! If anyone reading this does try, let us know. You could probably improve on our design no end! It would also be nice to make a larger and more detailed version, free from the constraints of minifig scale...
Tony:
I cant remember what is and isn't on the site. One thing few people
realize is that the graveyard scene is filmed
using specially imported monkeys wearing paper mache minifig costumes.
The monkeys were diseased, and imported quite illegally, so it didn't
much matter when we let them at one another with knives. We tried filming
the scene in a real graveyard but the monkeys kept knocking over headstones
which caused continuity problems. In the end we built a mock graveyard
in a confined gas chamber, and gassed the monkeys when we had finished.
ONE' uses a real foetus which we filmed through the stomach of a remarkable
transparent woman who is related to Tim.
Premiering ONE: A Space Odyssey with the other films must have been an interesting experience. Can you tell us about the other independent filmmakers there?
Tim:
It was great to get an audience reaction from real live people, it made
it all worthwhile! It also made us want to stick to comedy; some of
the other films were quite serious, and thus it was hard to tell how
much people liked them. It's very satisfying to get a laugh! The other
films were good, a very varied and interesting selection. Some of them
were only very tenuously related to 2001, but that's only to be expected
in this kind of project! There were some really nice ones anyway, including
a couple of great little segments from some Australian installation
artists who'd made realistic clips of futuristic spacemen at work..
they'd built really nice sets, relatively low budget but very convincing.
There was quite a funny Flash animation about the 'Dawn of
Time' Monkeys too...
Tony:
I could tell you stories about those filmmakers you wouldn't believe,
so I'll just talk about the films. It was a while ago now, so I cant
much remember. There was quite a funny one about the apes, using flash.
And one lot had built these very impressive space station interiors,
with people dangling about on string upside down and everything. A lot
of the other films had approached the project a little more seriously
than we at SYF, and I think that the hilarity which ensued during ONE'
(which was on first) may have lowered the audience tone a bit for the
more serious contenders. There is very little in life as wonderful as
being able to make a whole room of people laugh out loud at a joke you
made without even opening your mouth.
The film has some great effects, such as the blinking lights and animated faces. Can you tell us how this was done? How long did this take to accomplish? Can you take us through a few details?
Tim:
All effects involving superimposing of lights and matting different
elements were done using Adobe After Effects, although most of them
could also have been done in any basic editing program. Making 2001
is easy ('tell that to Stanley Kubrick' I hear you say) because there
are practically no camera movements, and everyone stays pretty much
still when talking. This made aligning the faces and computer displays
very simple! The faces were drawn by Tony and scanned, alpha channels
and effects were added in Photoshop. If we were filming a more kinetic
movie, it would probably be easier to use replacement heads with different
expressions physically drawn on instead.
Tony:
The blinking lights were generated, digitally, by a Kray 2000 and projected
using a digital laser projector into a 2x scale model of the pod interior
built from balsa wood, digitally. Dave's face is digitally manipulated
footage from the original Kubrick film back-projected onto the surface
of a seven foot mock up of the lego head, which was then mixed, digitally,
with the footage from the pod interior and front projected, digitally,
back over its self to make the digital monitor effects transparent.
The colour is added later, digitally.
Actually, the film was basically made using Adobe systems, and captured through a digital-8 camera. Most of the shots have either some matte work involved or at least heavy colour adjustment, which was all done in After-effects. Most of the effects work is basic but clever stuff, we have a very hands on 'eighties' approach to effects. Even though the software can do so much more, we wanted it to look fairly analog, which I think it does. Most effects are done using either basic split screen effects, traveling mattes, and layers of different types used in much the same way as chemical photography. The pod is just on a digitally removed stick. The Hotel Room, which is mostly cardboard, is on a lightbox, the slitscan was done (believe it or not) in Bryce, and of course there's that transparent lady.
What are some of your favorite brick-animated films that you have seen (besides your own, of course)?
Tim:
I haven't seen as many as I'd like due to lack of time and slowness
of downloading, but I've enjoyed all of them! '2001: A Lego Odyssey'
is really good (great minds think alike!) It's really interesting to
see how Marc Atkin has come up with such a different approach to the
same basic premise! And his 'slitscan' sequence with it's incredibly
spot-on 3D bricks is much better than ours! My favorite Legomovies of
all time are Tony's trilogy of sci-fi parodies which he made long before
I met him... they barely qualify as Legomovies, being made largely of
other toys, cardboard, towels etc as well as Minifigs, and they're shockingly
haphazard but hilariously silly and offensive!...pure punk filmmaking.
I doubt they'll ever appear online though, so I won't tantalize you
with further details!
Tony:
I must confess to having seen next to none, this is due to (A) a fairly
slow connection (B) most peoples movie files being much bigger than
necessary, and (C) a desire to spend as little time around my computer
as possible. The only one I think I've seen is the other 2001 film,
which has much better slitscan than ours.
What other tricks and tips can you give directors and film makers out there?
Tim:
Cheat! Use plasticine, blu-tak, polystyrene, cardboard, Photoshop, whatever
else you need to get the joke/story across! Also, don't worry about
animation technique too much... sometimes it's just funnier to have
a Legoman being pushed along on a stick in realtime! Really, the best
way to learn animation is to just play around until it looks good! Lego
is of course ideal for this sort of experimentation! Use as high a frame
rate as you can (or can be bothered to!) for smoother motion, but there's
no real need to go above 24/25 frames per second. Between 12 and 18
will do quite nicely in most cases. Oh, and try to recompress movies
as few times as possible (ideally not at all) for maximum image quality!
Above all, watch lots of animation of all styles and genres! Animation
production and technique is all about cutting corners and saving money,
so even the most expensive film will be full of inspiring and useful
tricks which you can put to good use on a smaller scale!
Tony:
Always shake the yogurt before you eat it, or all the consistency goes
to the top and sticks to the lid.
Any parting words or thoughts?
Tim:
Thanks for setting up Brickfilms! It's great to have a place for so
many Lego moviemakers to come together and get their work seen!! Keep
making Legomovies people! They are the future of cinema! Pure, unfettered
creativity... why bother making dull, overlong, expensive live-action
films when you can produce a more entertaining movie by staying at home
and playing with Lego! :-)
Tony:
You've got the touch.
You've got the power.
Yeah.
And I bloody well mean that as well.
