If you wouldn’t mind checking out my animation, I’d love to hear what you think about it! It’s called “Breaking the Fourth Wall”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w0R2QyffTI

It’s my first real animation I’ve ever done 🙂 I’m not too proud of the sound design but I really don’t know much about that stuff.. But I’d love to here what you think!

Does anyone happen to have a must-see list of Lego animations? The only ones I’ve seen that I would consider legitimate short-films are Lindsay Flea’s “The Magic Portal” and Maxime Marion’s “Droits d’auteur”. As much as I enjoy watching little lego comedy sketches by people like Keshen8 and SpastikChuwawa, sometimes I want a little bit more substance 😛

The bottom line, though, is that more people than ever are trying their hand at LEGO animation. As far as I’m concerned, this can only be a good thing.

I feel very lucky to have been born when I did. I was lucky that my family had a camcorder when I was a kid, which is what I used to make my first LEGO videos. They were just really starting to drop in price and become widely available around then.

YouTube also launched right when I was in college so I was able to start building an audience then. Thinking about YouTube distribution really affected how I wrote and filmed The Nightly News at Nine.

Yay for the modern era!

If anything, this is good news, as Brickfilming is now becoming more popular and recognised as a hobby. Hopefully new animators will in time become better and release longer, higher quality films. I myself have only just begun and still have much to learn.

One issue I think, though, is creativity. The brickfilms that become the most popular are invariably based on licensed themes (Star Wars, Batman, etc.) or existing material (such Insomniac’s music videos). The bulk of the work produced by the most famous/popular brickfilmers (ForrestFire, Keshen, Brotherhood Workshop) especially follows this trend. Fancypants’ most popular video is a lightsaber duel. Even Michael Hickox tends to tap into the average person’s perception of LEGO–as a children’s toy, telling stories in a simple, almost nostalgic way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this (Insomniac’s music videos are incredible, The Force Unleashed is rightly a textbook case on how to film a fight scene, Brotherhood’s films are hilarious and well executed, and your own “Don’t Blink” film was very nicely done) but it does point to a tendency to rely on other people’s creativity to get popular. It’s to a certain extent understandable–using something popular and recognizable (like Batman) will reach a much larger audience (I suspect this is why Superman and Batman are going to be in The LEGO Movie…), but it makes original, stand-alone stories told using LEGO as the medium much more difficult to bring to a larger audience. I doubt many outside of the brickfilming community are familiar with, say, “The Citizen of the Year”, “The Call of Farqunglu”, “Zombie: Genesis”, “Unrenewable”, “Copyright”, or “Pirates Rule!”; which is a shame, as these sort of films are by far more interesting than a short clip of Batman fighting Stormtroopers. Sadly, all this will most likely encourage most brickfilmers to make clips about licensed characters, instead of creating their own unique stories.

Well, I went a bit off-topic there, sorry for the overlong post. I enjoyed this article; it’s nice to see a different writer on The Set Bump! (Not that I have anything against Pickett and Pagano, of course!)

Also, great point about the LEGO Movie! It’ll be exciting to see what happens.

Those kids publish every 2 sec of animation they do and they are so proud of it. That’s the way people learns: by trying. So, I wouldn’t say their is a bunch of bad brickfilms on internet, I prefer to say that their a lot of people out there trying and learning, becoming better movies after movies. That’s how I started and I can tell you that’s how every great film maker started.

Jackson, this blog post is awesome and I agree with you. 🙂

-Sir Glub-