Fleay, Lindsay. the Magic Portal. YouTube

Anyone with a little equipment, time and imagination can make one. But there are things you can do (and equipment you can use) to make the process easier or to increase the quality of the final movie. You can reduce or increase the number of frames per second. One common technique in animation is to shoot 12 different frames for one second of film but to double them up, using two identical photos consecutively to make the playback speed 24 fps. A typical speed for a theatrical film is 24 fps. It's debated whether the 2014 Warner Brothers film "The Lego Movie" can be considered a brickfilm because most of the Legos and minifigures were computer generated. With digital, you can have the instant gratification of seeing your shots right away, and you can easily transfer the images to your computer to animate them with software. In some cases you might want or need to use multiple software packages; for instance, you might pick one for capturing and animating the images, another for capturing sound and a third for editing all the elements into the final film.

You might want to use sound editing software, such as Audacity, for recording and editing your dialogue and other sounds. Productions can be as complicated or simple as you want to make them. You'll probably want to study stop-motion techniques to make things move as realistically as possible, although brickfilm motion differs in some ways from most other stop motion. To make a stop-motion film, the filmmaker photographs inanimate objects in various poses, moving them just a tiny bit for each successive image. Since the creation of film, professionals and amateurs alike have experimented with the medium to create inventive animated works. And there are companies that will customize minifigures for you if you have the money. But even multipurpose animation software like Adobe Flash will do. If you shot using a blue or green screen, you can use the software to knock out that color and add a new image in its place. Once you have your sound recorded, pull it into whatever software you're using to edit the video. So if you have the will, and some Lego or similar brick building sets, you might want to give making a brickfilm a go. You can still use these cameras to capture shots, but you may not want to use the zoom function if you do.

To add fill lighting to reduce shadows, you can use another light, or something white, like a piece of paper, to bounce light onto the scene where needed. Whereas claymation animators use clay as their main character building medium, brickfilm makers use bricks - Lego bricks, that is. You can include non-brick objects, non-minifig characters, painted backgrounds, papier-mâché set pieces or anything else to augment your brickfilm. Most brickfilms employ set items built with Lego or similar bricks, with Lego minifigures or similar toy figures as the characters. Many of the set pieces were constructed of Lego bricks, and several characters were stop-motion animated minifigures, but the film also incorporated other stop-motion animated objects, some live-action shots of the animator, outdoor scenes and claymation. Lego itself has even gotten into the game with their free app, Lego Movie Maker, which lets you create stop-motion animations right on your phone or tablet. Lego sets really are just little movie sets waiting to happen. There are even a bunch of annual festivals and filmmaking competitions dedicated to them. Post　has be᠎en c​re at​ed by GSA Content Genera᠎tor ​DEMO᠎!

You can even get fancy with CGI - but viewers aren't likely expecting realistic, fully articulated characters with tons of expression changes when they watch a brickfilm. Anything that changes automatically might cause variations from picture to picture, causing oddly uneven or flickering effects on playback. Proper lighting will let the viewer see more clearly what's going on in each scene, help you simulate different types of settings (such as daytime, nighttime, indoor, outdoor, sunny or cloudy) and prevent shot-to-shot light changes that can cause unwanted flickering effects in your final film. I have an app on my phone that will let me take a series of quickie photos and animate them. But Legos, or their competitors' similar pieces, will need to figure prominently in order for it to be considered a brickfilm. The first brickfilm (as far as we know as of this writing) was called "Journey to the Moon" (or "En rejse til månen"), made in 1973 by young cousins Lars and Henrik Hassing on Super 8 film for their grandparents' anniversary.

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