Fleay, Lindsay. the Magic Portal. YouTube

Filming in natural (i.e., outdoor) light is usually considered a stop-motion no-no since it changes constantly (causing the dreaded flicker), but people have successfully incorporated outdoor shots into their brickfilms. Film and animation, and especially stop motion, have always been fascinating to me, so brickfilms are sort of a win-win. Using 24 fps (the film standard) or 30 fps (the video standard) makes for much smoother motion, but 12 or 15 fps are common for brickfilms and other stop-motion animation. One form of animation that's been around since nearly the beginning of the moving picture is stop-motion animation. It also takes a lot of these individual pictures to make a stop-motion film. To make a stop-motion film, the filmmaker photographs inanimate objects in various poses, moving them just a tiny bit for each successive image. Most software has a handy feature called "onion skinning" that lets you see transparent versions of previous frames on the screen with your current image. You can also find some pre-recorded sound effects online or in software packages. CGI takes some practice and skill, so you can also just use the software for the basics: getting your images imported and in order, setting the frame rate so the software knows how fast to play back the images, adding in your sound and exporting your film in a playable video format.

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. The resulting series of still images is strung together and played in quick succession as a movie, creating the illusion that the characters and other objects are in motion. Since you're taking a series of still shots, you can try incrementally moving the camera toward whatever you want to zoom in on instead. In 1958, the interlocking bricks were redesigned into the form they still hold today, which made them lock together much better than before. The company branched out into injection-molded plastic in the 1940s and began making the forerunner to modern Lego brick building sets late in the decade, initially calling them Automatic Binding Bricks. There are sets for buildings from various localities and time periods, from Medieval castles to Wild West towns to modern city blocks, and vehicles of all sorts, from pirate ships to automobiles to spaceships.  This da​ta has be᠎en　w ri tt en ᠎by GSA C ontent Gen er ator Demoversion.

That is 24 pictures flashing before your eyes in a single second of time. Anyone with a little equipment, time and imagination can make one. Anyone with the time and equipment can join in on the fun. Working on this article exposed me to lots of really cool and fun brickfilms, and I hope more and more people continue to use Legos to get their creative ideas out there on film. There are plenty of online tutorials for lighting stop-motion, or specifically brickfilm shoots, to help you get started and avoid pitfalls. 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. You can even add fancy details like a lightsaber glow, for instance, using the rotoscope technique. The popular video game "Minecraft" even has a few sets, which is entirely appropriate given that the game involves constructing buildings and other items out of virtual blocks. As you can imagine, these take quite a while to stage and film, and likely even longer to get them looking the way you want.

Ideally, you want to either film in a room with no windows or somehow block the windows to keep natural light or other external light from coming into the room. You will probably also want to keep doors to other rooms shut to keep out other household light. But Legos, or their competitors' similar pieces, will need to figure prominently in order for it to be considered a brickfilm. You can include non-brick objects, non-minifig characters, painted backgrounds, papier-mâché set pieces or anything else to augment your brickfilm. It requires creating and setting up set pieces and characters, moving them in tiny increments and photographing them after each miniscule change. Autofocus will often change when you don't want it to, or focus on the wrong element in the shot. The kids used stop motion, props on wires and one live-action shot of a foot to depict a rocket launch, journey and moon landing. 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. A newer, increasingly popular form of animation, usually created via stop-motion, is the brickfilm.

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