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

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.

The fine folks over at Eurobricks have launched a new subforum devoted to developing the skills of brick animators (and comic creators). Building off the success of the long-running Reviewers Academy which trains forum members in the art of making detailed photo reviews of new LEGO sets (random example), the Brick Flicks & Comics Academy not only offers detailed tutorials, but also a cadre of teachers who will review works in progress, assign you lessons to complete, and grade your progress.

While the majority of the current content is focused on the comic creation side, I know that more brick animation focused content is coming soon (I am still on hook to create a lesson ¬_¬ ). I encourage you all to visit the Academy Index to browse the existing content and/or submit requests for tutorials & lessons that you’d like to see in the future.  While anyone can browse Eurobricks, please note that members are required to be 18 years or older.

The BF&CA was originally created by Hinckley (who also made the awesome illustration above), but the forum moderator Darkdragon is responsible for the hard work of organizing it and getting teachers to contribute. Unlike the perpetual beta status of the Bricks in Motion Resources page, I think that Darkdragon’s leadership will make the academy a vibrant destination for brick animators who want to take their craft to a new level. I encourage the more experienced animators among us to think about contributing a tutorial or lesson (and I will take my own advice to heart and finally get to work on my own long-overdue contribution).

P.S. Check out Darkdragon’s animation “Code Monkey Music Video,” which features a Fabuland character, a Friends minidoll, and an awesome color scheme!

• The building contest is open to all users 16 years and older holding a ReBrick account. The voting process is open to all users holding a Rebrick account.
• To submit an entry:  Upload your video on YouTube (we do not host content on ReBrick) and add a bookmark to the video in the special themed category: Building Challenge on ReBrick.
• Video must not exceed 3 minutes.
• Entries must incorporate the theme of spooky fun.
• The contest begins October 1st at 9:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time (EST). Entries submitted to ReBrick before this date and time will not be accepted into the contest. Competition are open for submissions until October 29th 2012 at 8:59 A.M. EST.
• A panel of judges will review the five (5) bookmarks with most likes and select one (1) grand prize winner. The five semi-finalist videos will be reviewed based on creativity, originality and theme.
• Judging will begin at 9:00 A.M.  EST on October 29th 2012 and will end at 9:00 A.M. EST on October 31st 2012.
• Entries must only contain elements from the LEGO® collection.
• All entries and entrants must follow the ReBrick House Rules.
• We reserve the right to disqualify any entry that does not follow the official rules. Any form of cheating will result in a banning of user profile from ReBrick.

Grand Prize is a LEGO® Monster Fighters Haunted House signed by LEGO designer Adam Grabowski and a LEGO® Monster Fighters Exclusive Grab Bag — so that’s pretty cool!

I also asked ReBrick editor-in-chief Signe for a bit of clarification on the “Entries must only contain elements from the LEGO® collection” caveat, and here’s what she had to say:

• Q: Do the films have to contain things specifically from the “Monster Fighters” play theme?
• A: No, we just think the Monster Fighters theme is great for Halloween, and that’s why we chose to highlight that theme.
• Q: Or does it mean that the films in general must use only LEGO parts (and nothing from competing brands)?
• A: Yes, exactly. No competing brands. And don’t dress up in homemade Halloween Minifigure costumes, it’s only LEGO products you can use in the film ;o)
• Q: Can people make films using any LEGO sets or parts they want, as long as the topic is appropriately spooky?
• A: You can use any part/set from the LEGO collection you want. We want a Halloween film, so spooky with a twist of fun.

So there you go, guys and gals! Better get building… the contest is only open until October 29th!

ReBrick | Blog | ReBrick Flick Halloween Competition

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

After the pillars of the community left, the Brickfilms.com forums became a desolate wasteland; filled primarily with spambots, questions about what had happened to the once great site, and a trickle of sub-par animations.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Brickfilms.com has continued to sputter on, undergoing several redesigns in the hands of subsequent webmasters. The latest of these launched in the last month. On the plus side, some of the old content (the film directory) from a previous incarnation of the site — which was hidden in the last redesign — is once again accessible. On the down side, the film directory is an absolute nightmare to navigate.

On the humorous side, the site is riddled with bizarre errors. My favorite of these is that the “contact us” links on the site currently link to an old forum discussion about contact with alien lifeforms.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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