Over the past few years, we haven’t been able to update or post things as much as we would have liked, and our discussions on the world of LEGO animation and brickfilms have moved almost entirely to our individual web and social media channels (e.g. Paganomation and BRICK 101).

But before we take down the blog on DESTRUCTION DAY (May 16, 2018), we wanted to give you a chance to save any of your favorite links or articles from the site.

Thanks again for reading and contributing to The Set Bump!

– David Pagano and Dave Pickett

Brick à Brack, founded in 2008, is a website devoted to the French brickfilming community. With over 1,500 users and 3,400 brickfilms on the site, Brick à Brack is one of the largest brickfilming communities on the web, rivaling Bricks in Motion.

I got an exclusive interview with Brick à Brack administrator Maxou44 in Brick à Brack’s Discord chat discussing the forum changes:

– What is the history of the creation of Brick à Brack?

– Brick à Brack was created in September 2008 by Parod and R-Creator, at the begining it was a simple forum that allowed some brickfilmeurs to share their creations (it was the beginnings of the brickfilm in France), year after year, Brick à Brack grew, member after member a great community ready to share and exchange around their common passion: the brickfilm! For the last few years we have multiplied competitions and exhibitions with the aim of democratizing brickfilm!

– What prompted you to create an English section to your forums instead of keeping your community exclusively French?

For almost 10 years now, our goal has been to promote brickfilm and create an active and welded community around this passion, over the last few years many English members have joined us but were unable to use the site properly or participate in our competitions due to language barriers. We have therefore taken things in hand to make our site accessible to as many people as possible! Our goal is to bring the brickfilmers together, not to divide them

– Do you have any plans to expand Brick a Brack to other languages besides French and English?

For the time being, we would like to maintain and grow the English-speaking community that comes to our site, welcoming anglophones to our site is something that is not necessarily simple for us, we don’t speak perfectly English, we have to organize ourselves differently and spend more time maintaining and moderating the site. When everything will be in place and our English-speaking friends will be well integrated, if we think it could be beneficial for another community to translate our website, we will do the necessary.

So whether you speak French or English, Brick à Brack has something for you! Hop on over to their website and register today!

https://www.brick-a-brack.com

As a frequent Kickstarter, I am no stranger to uncompleted projects, so I long ago wrote off my Melting Point pledge as payment for my enjoyment of all the brickfilms Jonathan produced for free. But judging by the comments on the video, there are still many who are upset about the status of this project. It’s truly unfortunate that it gained so much notoriety because it was featured in “A Lego Brickumentary”. I can certainly relate to putting a brickfilm on hold in order to write a book. But even after watching this update, the question remains “Will Melting Point ever be finished?”

What do you think?

Story Lab is housed in the Green Zone of LEGO House. Based on this image, it seems to include at least 18 workstations where visitors can create stop-motion animations using a touchscreen interface. Each workstation has a green screen backdrop, so participants will presumably be able to choose from pre-set backgrounds for their films. Beyond that, it’s hard to know how much control participants will have. If nothing else, Story Lab should introduce a lot of new people to the art of brickfilming and hopefully get them excited to pursue it on their own.

Another area of LEGO House I’m interested to learn more about is the Masterpiece Gallery, which will have a curated selection of works by LEGO fans from around the world. Hopefully, the curators will put brickfilms on display in addition to LEGO sculptures. And if the curators need any ideas for films to include, hopefully the archive of this blog will be useful

Retailing for 35 Singapore dollars (roughly $25 USD), the set includes 152 pieces, most of which seem to be used to build a smartphone camera mount. The camera mount looks like it can tilt using technic connections and do a dolly move by rotating at its attachment point (mixel ball joint) to the set. The set seems to include cardboard backdrops similar to the LEGO Studio sets.

This set hasn’t been officially announced by LEGO, so we don’t have many details, but it’s safe to assume that LEGO will be offering some kind of stop motion app in conjunction with this set. Which would explain why they recently removed their two stop motion apps.

It’s nice to see LEGO returning to this type of set after 15 years. We’ll have a full review of this set once it’s more widely available.

LEGO Life seems to be the replacement for the LEGO Club, the former hub of online LEGO activity featuring games, challenges, videos, and of course, the LEGO Club magazine. With the introduction of LEGO Life comes the introduction of the LEGO Life magazine.

Besides user-submitted content, the app also features officially curated content, most of which comes from LEGO.com. Along with stop-motion videos that were commissioned by the LEGO Group, some of the videos in the Ninjago category are entries to the LEGO ReBrick Greatest Villain of all Time in NINJAGO contest—a few of which did not even place in the runner-up category.

As a pleasant surprise, I noticed that the the app also features the brickfilm classic The Han Solo Affair alongside the more modern animated videos.

Other than that, there unfortunately does not seem to be much stop-motion content within the app. However, now that LEGO has undergone this massive overhaul in their online presence, let us hope that they will bring back the stop-motion aspects once again.

LEGO Life is available in some countries for iPhone and iPad, with an Android version reportedly coming soon.

Philip Heinrich directed, edited, and produced the feature length documentary that “explores the lives of individuals involved in the hobby of creating stop-motion animated films with LEGO bricks and other building toys.” Fellow producers include Zach Macias, Doug Vandegrift Jr., and Nathan Wells. (Editor’s note: and our very own David Pagano!)

The documentary film was a crowd funded Kickstarter project backed by 270 funders. They raised $12,800 to help send the producers of the documentary around the world to interview brickfilmers. Most of those Kickstarter funders have had the opportunity to see the documentary, but the general public has not… until now. Pre-order is available for $8.99!

The interviews were filmed in 17 cities on both sides of the Atlantic.  Interview filming consisted of 18 days in North America and 18 days in Europe. The film also has original animated segments along with dozens of pre-existing brickfilms. Producers Philip, Zach, and Nathan animated for three weeks “tirelessly together on a tight schedule to complete.”

Seán Willis is credited as assistant editor. His task was cataloging and organizing the interview content for Philip to edit. The editing process was extensive and many revisions were made. Different cuts were “shown to various producers and audiences in order to gauge pacing and clarity.” After about 4 months of editing, the film was completed.

“Bricks In Motion” runs 1 hour 27 minutes and has both English and French subtitles available. The filmmakers have also set up a Thunderclap campaign to promote the film’s online release.

As a LEGO Creator themed contest, the goal is for entrants to create a 15 to 45 second stop-motion animation showing the building and rebuilding of a LEGO Creator 3-in-1 set. Films cannot feature other LEGO parts that are not included in the specific LEGO Creator 3-in-1 set used by an entrant, nor can the video feature anything besides the LEGO set (such as hands or clay). The video’s background must also be clean and uncluttered, according to the ReBrick rules. I assume this is to ensure that the completed videos correspond with the LEGO Creator branding and are similar to the building videos already featured on the LEGO Creator website.

In contrast to the previous stop-motion contests on ReBrick, this contest does not allow Creative Commons music or sound effects. Unfortunately for those who aren’t musically talented (), the rules state that all sounds and music must be original and created by the entrant or from a “LEGO movie editor/music creator.” If this is referencing the LEGO Movie Maker app, then many people are out of luck due to the recent closure of the app. (If there is some other LEGO movie editor/music creator app out there, please let us know in the comments!)

The contest is now open and runs until March 22, 2017 at 10:00 am EST. As with every ReBrick contest, it is only available for entrants ages 13 and older. I look forward to seeing many of your awesome entries there!

Do you think this contest looks fun? Are you planning on entering? What do you think about the rules? Tell us down in the comments below! Also be sure to check out The Set Bump on Facebook and Twitter!

The four Brick Tricks videos are well made; they mix live-action and stop-motion footage to clearly convey the information. I’m sure that beginning brickfilmers will find these tips helpful. In a weird coincidence, both Brick Tricks and our book illustrate the concept of deleting unnecessary shots from a movie using the example of someone walking to/from the Palace Cinema set.

The video descriptions of the Brick Tricks videos encourage viewers to “create your own stop-motion videos by downloading the Creator App.” However, the link leads to the Creator Island app (which is just a game with no stop-motion features) as opposed to the LEGO Creator app. According to the Google Play page for LEGO Creator, the app was last updated on December 12, 2016 (3 days before these videos launched on YouTube). It seems like the update was just to add a message that it is being discontinued.

I don’t mourn the loss of the LEGO Creator app; it was around for less than a year. The bigger loss—which I uncovered while researching the LEGO Creator disappearance—is that LEGO appears to have discontinued the LEGO Movie Maker app as well, after providing it for free for 4 years. The LEGO Movie Maker app wasn’t perfect (its biggest limitation was that it was only available for iOS), but it was a really good app for beginning brickfilmers and I have been recommending it to people since it was first released.

My hope is that LEGO has removed these apps in preparation for launching a new cross-platform brickfilming app in conjunction with the LEGO Batman Movie next month—but that’s pure speculation.

A “Save the Arctic” campaign video from Greenpeace has been making the rounds, calling on The LEGO Group to end its partnership with multinational oil and gas company Shell.

The video features a vast arctic landscape, where humans and wildlife are swallowed up by a gigantic amount of oil released by a brick-built Shell oil rig. The piece ends with a caption that reads “Shell is polluting our kids’ imaginations”, and the whole affair is underscored by a haunting cover of “Everything is Awesome”.

In some ways, this campaign is brilliant. Between The LEGO Movie, the “Beyond the Brick” documentary, and the usual promo releases from TLG, 2014 has squarely solidified LEGO video content into the zeitgeist. This production plays right into that — not only through the music, but with some well-designed builds, artfully composed shots, and sweeping camera work. (For the moment, let’s ignore the blatant inclusion of a Mega Bloks Brickforge Halo figure, and GoT-looking figs that may or may not be the ones from Citizen Brick.)

As clean as the cinematography is, though, the actual message of the video feels a bit more muddled. I understand what the goal is: Greenpeace wants to convince LEGO to end its partnership with Shell. That’s the “what”. But the “why” of it all seems less clear; at least as far as this video and the associated website are concerned.

When I first heard about this online movement a week ago, my initial reaction was “does TLG even still make Shell-branded sets?” Apparently, the answer is yes. Here’s a bit of history on TLG’s partnership with Shell:

• Shell-branded LEGO sets appeared as early as 1966.
• According to Brickipedia (which could really use some better attribution), the majority of the Shell sets were not available in the US. It seems as though Shell-branded LEGO products only started appearing stateside in 1986.
• Prior to 1986, TLG also released a few Exxon-branded sets in the US.
• In 1992, Octan began to replace Shell as the main (albeit fictional) gasoline brand of LEGO Town (and later, City) sets.
• 1999 saw the last of the official wide-release sets with Shell branding from TLG.
• The Shell logo continued to be prevalent in LEGO kits until as recently as 2012, due to the partnership between Shell and Ferrari.
• Additionally, LEGO products continue to be offered as exclusives at Shell stations to this day, though they are not always available in all regions.

However, none of this information is included in the Greenpeace “Save the Arctic” website. Nor is there much information about what Shell is doing, or documented evidence as to how the environment is being affected. And for what little content there actually is on the site, there’s basically no attribution or sources. (Although some digging did turn up this PDF that goes into a bit more detail.)

What we get instead as the main hub of this campaign is a weird, heavy-handed, confusing-to-navigate site that approaches “LEGO CL!CK” levels of poor web design. Selecting the “more information” button on the site continues the mixed messages: should readers be concerned about advertising’s influence on the children, saving the Arctic, preventing global warming, or Shell’s use of licensing partners to distract from its other corporate ventures? It feels like Greenpeace wants folks to simultaneously think about all and none of these things, and instead get so riled up in a ball of knee-jerk emotion that they sign the petition without a second thought. 

Personally, I’d rather do some research and make well-informed decisions. Is Shell involved in some unsavory business practices? Seems like it. Does a partnership with Shell fly in the face of TLG’s commitment to environmental responsibility? Maybe. Should a petitioning crusade eschew sourced information and individual judgment in favor of reactionary tactics to make its voice heard? Probably not.

As a footnote: My research here is by no means exhaustive. If you’ve got thoughts or facts to contribute, or articles to reference, feel free to post them in the comments below. This campaign has already seen coverage in the International Business Times, Forbes, CBC News, and elsewhere.

This isn’t the first time LEGO video content has been utilized in the service of activism, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

EDIT 7/11/14: Looks like the video was pulled from YouTube due to a copyright claim from Warner Bros.

EDIT 7/14/14: The video is back up on YouTube, and currently has 4.2 million views.

LEGO: Everything is NOT awesome. – YouTube

One can choose between five notable brickfilming contests with deadlines between Christmas morning and the end of year.  Two of the competitions do not even require that the brickfilm be made special for that particular contest, just as long as it was made in 2013.  All of the contests have prizes.

BricksInMotion.com will be holding their annual Twenty-four Hour Animation Contest just a few days before the end of the year.  THAC11 will start at 12pm GMT on Saturday December 28th, 2013. Brickfilmers that enter a THAC do all the idea-making, writing, recording, animating, editing and submitting in just one twenty-four hour period.  It can be quite a grueling process.  At the start time of the contest, details about THAC will be announced on BIM that will include the theme and mod elements.  Although BIM has a few other official contests, I tend to view THAC as their most prestigious contest.  Some notable past winners are Sméagol, Legoander, ForlornCreature, and SpastikChuwawa. The contest does have prizes from its sponsor Brickworld.  Hazzat (Zoot Productions) is administering the contest announcement thread on BIM.  Let’s hope for an on time start this year as there has been issues with that in the past.

A Repelling Spider is hosting another installment of Christmas in a Minute.  The goal of the contest is to make a 20-60 second Christmas themed brickfilm that “can stand out and claim a victory”.  There are prizes for the winners which were provided by contest sponsors Firestar Toys and Mighty Wanderer. The deadline is Christmas Eve, Tuesday December 24, 2013 at 11:59pm EST.  For more information about this great contest, watch the announcement video here.

Members of the French brickfiming website Brick-à-Brack can enter Brickstars.  Brick-à-Brack hosts their big annual brickfilm contest at the end of the year.  Any film released in the year 2013 is eligible for this contest.  Entries will be judged in several different categories such as Best Soundtrack, Best Production Design, Best Special Effects, Best Screenplay, Best Animation, and Best Brickfilmer. Other awards will also be given out for “Most Promising Video” and “Audience Award” that is voted on by Brick-à-Brack members.  Past winners have included great brickfilmers such as France & Alex, Legoander, Aiwha, and Loïc F-B.

 A sports themed brickfilming contest called OYO Video Challege II is being hosted and judged by thefourmonkeys.  OYO Sportstoys is sponsoring the contest and providing prizes. OYO Sportstoys make LEGO compatible minfigures for NFL and Major League Baseball teams. The deadline is  December 31st at 9pm EST.  The rules are posted on a blog by thefourmonkeys on the Brickfilmer’s Guild. You can also checkout the announcement video here. The main directive for the contest is to show an OYO Sportstoys minifigure(s) in action.  The deadline has passed for the free OYO minifigure, but prizes will be awarded for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners.  BigBudLego and PritchardStudios placed 1st and 2nd last year.

The Brickfilmer’s Guild is also back with the 2013 Brickfilmer’s Guild Animation Festival.  The Brickfilmer’s Guild Animation Festival is the annual animation festival hosted on the Brickfilmer’s Guild and judged by thefourmonkeys and members of the Brickfilmer’s Guild (Member’s Choice). The festival is in its sophomore year and has slightly tweaked rules from last year. Only one brickfilm per person is allowed and there is a 10 minute time limit for the brickfilms. The festival is open to any brickfilmer including non-Brickfilmer’s Guild members. Honors will be mentioned for many categories and there will be a prize for Best Brickfilm.  Last year, the Best Brickfilm went to the amazing brickfilmer namchild for his outstanding brickfilm entitled The Duel (LEGO).

I was hoping to report about a sixth brickfilming contest, but it appears that Megabloks Toymation will not have a 2013 edition.  That’s too bad as the past winners have had some really great entries.

Happy competing!

Everything you need to know is right here, but allow me to make fun of the executional mandatories and highlight other silly tidbits from the rules:

The world of LEGO® is large, but you are free to use any of the characters that appear in the trailer as part of your creation.

Don’t let the fact that all the characters shown in the trailer are only available in sets that don’t come out until a week before this contest is over hamper your creativity!

If submitting a live action entry, do not reenact life threatening or potentially dangerous situations.  For example, do not stand in the middle of traffic, do not swing a dolphin, do not try to fight crime like Batman.

Do not glue a LEGO brick to your back, do not name a character Wyldstyle, do not spoil all of Batman’s funny lines by putting them in the trailer…

For this project only, all entries will become the property of the Sponsor upon submission.  However, Sponsor agrees not to exploit a submission without compensation to the submitter.

Phew! For a minute there, I was worried about being exploited!

As thefourmonkeys pointed out, there’s a long tradition of recreating movie trailers in LEGO, so I would not be surprised to see this trailer recreated in stop-motion. I would take the Honest Trailers approach myself.

Let’s start with Emmet’s apartment

First of all, NPU on the ceiling lamps and the couch arms. Clearly they have some expert LEGO model designers on staff. Second, nice reference to your previous movies with those posters, Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who apparently get a joint Wikipedia entry, I guess neither has accomplished anything significant outside of their partnership?).

There’s a lot of fun Octan propaganda in this city scene, but what I really appreciate that is that the LED board is covered in actual 1×1 round plates and that the highway road sign references locales from LEGO themes new and old.

Why is “The Batwing” in quotations marks?

I love the use of arches in the windows of the Master Builders’ forum. Also love the rainbow color scheme. Very appropriate for a band of rebels who are building without instructions.

You really have to admire the brick-built explosions. They even used the ice cream scoops piece for the smoke trails like AFOLs do.  (Again, this is slightly less impressive since this is is CGI, but still).

I can’t wait to get Lord Business’s cool helmet in a set.

Based on that recess on the inside of Vitruvius’s arm, he was manufactured at a Chinese plant. Of course, that makes sense since it has already been announced that there will be a line of Collectible Minifigures based on the LEGO Movie. But still, talk about attention to detail.

Another awesome brick-built explosion. I also admire the care that has gone into the landscape. Those slopes on the hills are pretty accurate to what can be done with real bricks. Even where they deviate from the LEGO palette (look closely at some of the rounded corners), they are mimicking the shape of curvy LEGO pieces.

What details did you pick up on?

Late night talk show host Conan O’Brien got the LEGO treatment by the folks over at LucasArts as part of a promotion for LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues.

Recently on his show, the actor Simon Pegg showed off his Shaun Of The Dead Action Figures.  On another occasion, the actor Paul Rudd presented Conan with a picture of a custom mini-figure made by is his son during his interview with Conan.  Brick artist Nathan Sawaya has built a couple of life-size sculptures of Conan. (The time lapse video of Nathan working on one of the statues is amazing!)

But…what we are most excited about is the connection Conan has with brickfilmers.

Last year, Conan had a brush with brickfilming fame in a Halloween store in Los Angeles.  Sean Willets, aka filmyguy1, appears with Conan in the sexy outfit section of the costume shop.  (It’s near the 2 minute mark).  Sean’s mom also makes an appearance.

Unfortunately no brickfilming was discussed.

Atticus Shaffer, star of TV show The Middle, discussed his love for making LEGO stop motion films during his interview with Conan.

Donald Faison, star of The Exes and Scrubs, discussed his passion for making LEGO stop motion with Conan.  Donald Faison is the man behind Black Storm Trooper.

The mouth movements are done with stop motion.  Respect, man! Check out his interview on the Team Coco site (part 1, part 2).

Conan played a few brickfilms on his television show.  One brickfilm that aired on Conan was by Grayson MacLean, the childhood inventor.  Grayson MacLean invented BrickStix and was interviewed by Conan a few years ago.

Here’s the extended version of Grayson’s brickfilm:

Conan played yet another brickfilm on his television show called Cheer Up, Legos!  It was apparently produced by Conan’s team in response to news stories about LEGO not having as many smiles as they once did.  It’s quite funny.  Warning: it has some mature content, so view at your own discretion.

So Conan, when are you going to interview another brickfilmer or play another brickfilm on your show? We love it!

The Set Bump turns one year old today!

It was not so long ago (last August, in fact) that we said “Hello World” with our first post; kicking off a great year of news, reviews, editorials, and other animation-y brick-a-brack. In the coming year, we plan to continue upping the ante with all kinds of new content. You might have already seen the first result of our foray into the world of guest contributors — A Repelling Spider’s post about how, when it comes to animating with LEGO bricks, there is no time like the present.

Anyway, we’d like to extend a big thank-you to all our readers, commenters, and supporters for your continued interest in and feedback on our little corner of the internet. If all goes according to plan, year two should be even more interesting.

They’re making a LEGO Movie, after all!

1) In addition to the DC Universe Tongal Contest, LEGO also launched a Marvel one. Since I already made fun of the “executional mandatories” in the last post, I’m all out of jokes on this one.

2) I don’t blame you if you’ve never heard of Monitogo Studios or Greg Tull. Even though he’s been making brick animations since 2008, none have been released online. Unless you were at SAICFF 2009, you probably missed their last animation.

David and I first met Greg Tull during our “Intro to LEGO Animation” workshop at Brickworld a few years ago. The workshop is three hours long, so we let the audience interrupt frequently with questions and comments. In addition to the usual questions about how to make characters fly and what frame rate we use, one audience member kept raising his hand to discuss the finer points of DragonFrame and advanced lighting techniques. My co-author joked “maybe you should be the one up here teaching the class.”

The very next year, Greg was leading his own workshop on brick animation which gave participants hands-on experience animating and taught them how to think about lighting and camera angles the way a Hollywood director would. It was a great compliment to our workshop and it was a nice opportunity for us to be students again. This year, Greg had a last-minute commitment that prevented him from attending most of Brickworld, but he still drove 8 hours (each way) just so he could give the “Advanced Animation Workshop” again.

I say all of this to give you a sense of who Greg is and show how dedicated he is not only to making brick animations, but to teaching and inspiring others. He follows through on his promises, even if it means putting in some extra hours of tedium on very little sleep. If that’s not the mark of a true animator, I don’t know what is.

The few glimpses of “Bound” on display on the Kickstarter page are promising, the animation is fluid and the facial animation is good (if you’re into that). There are some epic wide shots in the video (starting at about 1:21) and I really want to see the parts of the film set in the mine. I talked at length in my last post on this subject about why I think it’s important to support artists, so it should come as no surprise to you that I’m supporting this one.

Will “Bound” be a success like “Melting Point” or will it join “Ghost Town” among the ranks of brick animation projects on Kickstarter that didn’t quite make it? Only you can decide! Go check out the project on Kickstarter!

3) Here’s a really great interview with the directors and co-director of “The LEGO® Movie.” More interesting tidbits about how the film is animated:

…with stop motion there’s no motion blur because every frame is its own little thing.  We found out if a character is moving really fast across the screen, it was going to get a little bit jumpy.  And so, we developed this brick-built motion blur of the characters when they’re moving really fast, and we have these special clever solves for things like that.

See!? Even fancy Hollywood people with budgets of millions of dollars prefer brick-built special effects! Or at least brick-built-and-then-cleverly-replicated-in-a-photo-realistic-CG-environment special effects. I really can’t wait to watch every behind-the-scenes feature on this movie.

Miller: It was inspired a lot by brick films that people make online.  There are a ton of these on YouTube where these people very creatively make funny, funny LEGO movies and the limitations of the characters is kind of funny.  Also, there are some photographers that photograph the little LEGO people and try to make it look really epic, just from the lighting.  And we thought that was pretty cool when they tried to marry a cinematic lighting style with a brick film aesthetic.

Lord: I think it was a choice we made the instant that Dan Lin pitched us the project.  We were like, “Well, if you did it like this, we would be interested.  But if you don’t, if no one will commit to that, then there’s no way we’ll do it.”

This commitment to the visual aesthetic gives me a lot of hope for this movie and what it could mean for other LEGO movies and TV shows in the future. If this is a runaway success, maybe the goofy CGI of the Cartoon Network shows and Traveler’s Tales games will give way to more “realistic” stop-motionesque CGI or maybe even honest-to-goodness stop-motion? I can dream at least

The interview goes into a lot more about the voice actors, some classic LEGO themes they are including, and so on, so definitely check it out if you are interested in every little scrap of information about this movie (and if you aren’t please let me know before I write 10 more blog posts on the subject).

There is also some shaky handheld footage of the Comic-Con panel available: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. I haven’t watched these all the way through yet, but the kid who asks a question at the beginning of Part 4 is awesome.

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes Video Project on Tongal

“Bound” – Fun. Animated. Brickfilm on Kickstarter

Comic-Con: Directors Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Chris McKay Talk THE LEGO MOVIE on Collider

Continuing our on-going coverage of “The LEGO® Movie,” here are some new details that came out in the media frenzy surrounding Comic-Con.

Unsurprisingly, the LEGO Group released the first image of one of the 17 tie-in sets, and announced the other inevitable tie-ins—a videogame (guess what it’s called?) and truckloads of merchandise. If you missed this news, I don’t blame you since it was announced within days of two new Minecraft sets, a Batman set, a Hobbit set, a Star Wars set, and the Back to the Future set went on sale.

On Saturday of Comic-Con the directors of “The LEGO Movie,” Phillip Lord and Chris Miller, were on a panel and had some interesting things to say:

The LEGO Movie is part-CGI and part actual real LEGO bricks in stop-motion, and Lord and Miller told the audience they absolutely do not want you to be able to tell which is which.

To further add to the confusion, Phillip Lord tweeted out this picture. Animation experts can see that it quite obviously staged—the camera’s not connected to anything, the lighting’s all wrong for animating,  etc.— but I’m sure there are some people who will take it at face value.

Producer Dan Lin said they had a fan contest and invited people to make short LEGO films, and some of that stuff made it into the film.

Hey, that’s good news for the three winners of the contest! It wasn’t clear if they would actually put those bits in or not. They also revealed some casting news:

Channing Tatum is Superman, Jonah Hill is Green Lantern — and Cobie Smulders is “the first film incarnation of Wonder Woman.”

Stay tuned for more details as they come out!

Is “The LEGO Movie”really the best film ever? Signs point to yes! on i09

Technically, this won’t be the first official LEGO feature — there are the four Bionicle films, as well as The Adventures of Clutch Powers; though these are all direct-to-DVD releases. (Also, did you know they’re planning a live-action Hero Factory movie?) I’m sure we’ll cover all of these films on this site at some point, despite the fact that they’re CG animated and not what we classify as true “LEGO Animation”.

Anyway, from what we know, “LEGO: The Motion Picture” won’t fall into that category, either, as it will be mostly CGI with some live-action photography. Other information about the film that has been released thus far (some of it just rumors, I’m sure):

• The release date of the film (as of this writing) has been announced as February 28, 2014.
• The working title (according to the often-misinformed IMDb) is “LEGO: The Piece of Resistance”.
• The film’s story was penned by Dan and Kevin Hageman, who previously worked on the “Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu” animated series on Cartoon Network, as well as the forthcoming animated feature “Hotel Transylvania“.
• Also credited as writers are co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, known for the surprisingly delightful “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” film adaptation.
• In an interview with MTV, the two directors discuss the plot of the film, and how it’s “weird, in a great way.” (Color me intrigued.)
• “Parks and Recreation” actor Chris Pratt has been cast as “Emmett”, the main character of the film.
• Will Arnett has apparently signed on to voice Batman (a minifigure Batman, I’m assuming). My gut is telling me “awesome!”… but my gut is also very hungry.
• Finally, there’s LEGOTheMotionPicture.com, where you can enter a vehicle design contest for a chance to have one of your LEGO creations featured in the film. There’s also a Facebook fan page if you’re into that sort of thing.

What do you guys think? Does the “LEGO Movie” sound like something you’d go see?

UPDATE [08/29/12 11:00am EDT]

Apparently production folks’ ears must have been burning as I wrote this post, because just as it went live, some new casting and plot information started floating around:

• Morgan Freeman has been cast as someone called “Vitruvius”; possibly named after the Roman architect (or a Da Vinci reference)?
• Elizabeth Banks has been cast as someone TBA.
• Australian animation house Animal Logic will do the CGI work.
• The film’s plot on IMDb: “An ordinary Lego mini-figure, mistakenly thought to be the extraordinary MasterBuilder, is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil Lego tyrant from gluing the universe together.”
• Some alternate plot info from Gizmodo.
• A twitter account for the film.

Though they’ve had a presence there for several years now, TLG has finally created a central hub on YouTube for all of their video content. I’ve found myself puzzled about the bizarre fracturing of LEGO YouTube channels in the past (I don’t know about you, but when I think of LEGO, the first thing I think to search for is “Dzine123”).

But yes, this is a great step in the right direction, even though right now there are a lot of duplicate videos from elsewhere, and comments seem to be universally closed. I’m sure as new shorts are produced, we can expect to see their releases on the official LEGO channel first. Good luck with it, guys!

The Official LEGO® Channel – YouTube