I had been toying with the idea of making a Lego stop-motion movie for quite a while before I had the idea for a Halloween short which gave me the impetus to get started.
For the camera I used my Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, the cast was composed of a number of Lego minifigures.
The set was made out of a Lego baseplate and handmade scenery.
The most intricate part of the whole endeavour was making the bookshelf and books out of cardboard.
I was rather pleased with the finished result:
It is important to have a script, for even though it is a silent film you need to keep track of what is going to happen and where the intertitles have to be placed.
Depending on how much movement is occurring I found it best to keep scenes fairly short to prevent accidents, including fingers appearing at the wrong moment, camera and set collapse as general mishaps that would necessitate the re-shooting of an entire scene. The Lego bumps on the baseplate made it easy to keep track of where the characters are supposed to move.
Creating a Lego movie can be a good way of engaging a group of teens, you can get a group working on script development, another on set design and creation, depending on the number of scenes you want to incorporate you can have multiple phone-camera operators, Lego minifigure wranglers each controlling the movements of their character and director (or directors) who maintain overall control of the filming.
I would recommend using a mobile phone tripod to cut down on camera shake although Youtube does offer the tools to stabilise the finished movie.
Jobs for a group-made stop-motion film:
Director
Script-writers
Set designers/creators
Camera-operators
Lego-wranglers
Intertitle creators
Editors
Publicity team
