Contest sponsored by BrickScope.
Sponsored by:
For links to the films, as well as more information and discussion, see the results thread.
Best Animation
A Clone Halloween - Fancypants
Best Screenplay
Days of Our Pizza - Keshen
Best Cinematography
The River - Night Owl
Best Visual Effects
Picturesque - Nick Durron
Best Set Design
Alles ist die Noppe - nichtgedreht
Best Sound Design
The River - Night Owl
Best Original Score
The River - Night Owl
Best Vocal Performance
Keshen as Febrizzio in Days of Our Pizza
Best Ensemble Cast
It's the Network
Best Series
Nightly News at Nine - Fallentomato
Viewers' Choice
The River - Night Owl
Best Film
Alles ist die Noppe - nichtgedreht
Check out the discussion thread for more information and discussion. Thank you to NXTManiac for organizing and overseeing the awards!
1. The River by Nikolas JaegerTotal Score: 94.1/100
2. CYCLIC by David BoddyTotal Score: 82.8/100
3. Crisis Reverted by AncientBricks & PdoubleyouCTotal Score: 66.1/100
Thank you to the other judges (Noodle, Keshen, 0ldscratch, in addition to myself) and to all our entrants for support of the contest. Thanks as well to Cheshire for agreeing to donate the 1st prize. Congratulations to everyone who completed a film for this contest and especially to the winners.
Full results and scoring in the discussion thread.
Also, thanks to Smeagol, VN, MindGame, and Yanzl for announcing some winners during the Live session.
The winners were:
Unrenewable - Best Film
Attack of the Second Amendment - Best Animation
Unrenewable - Best Screenplay
Bill Carney's Body - Best Cinematography
Unrenewable - Best Visual Effects
802.701 The Time Machine - Best Set Design
The New Neighbour- Best Sound Design
Unrenewable - Best Original Score
Unrenewable - Best Vocal Performance (Philip Heinrich as Jack Darter)
Unrenewable - Best Ensemble Cast
Results Thread
I would like to thank Chris Boyer (SlothPaladin) for the immense amount of work he has put into programming this directory over the last few months. It was a big commitment for him to spend his free time programming this site after working on other site programming during the workday. Completing the directory in a timely manner and with good results would not have been possible without him.
The beta testing team was also invaluable in testing the directory, providing feedback, and submitting their films as testing grounds for the directory.
We would also like to recognize Jonathan Schlaepfer for his contributions and feedback. He laid much of the groundwork for the submission form and several other elements of the directory.
Watch it in HD at Vimeo!
Watch it at Youtube
H.264 Download 720p 13MB
At this point the two things that need to be finished before we can launch the directory are the view film page and the review panel system, the submission form was one of the biggest tasks and we hope to have the directory up very soon.
Discuss this
Thanks and welcome everyone!
I am proud to announce that BricksInMotion's first contest is officially underway!
The Bricks In Motion Technical Excellence Competition is an annual event that we will hold to encourage filmmakers to pursue not only thrilling stories and high quality cinematography, but also stunning / complex stop motion animation.
Entries are limited to 10-40 seconds long and must be entirely stop motion animated (masking out wires, etc. is okay but, for example, a 3D glass shatter would not, neither would anything greenscreened). In addition, all entries must contain no sound and must be only one camera shot. The idea is that you are focusing on the animation, not on anything else.
The rules are strict and the panel of judges (consisting of Buxton, Dewfilms, and myself) will be even stricter. Every frame counts.
The prize, however, are (I think) worth it:
All entries must be submitted before 12:00 AM PDT on August 13th of this year.
For more specific rules (including some specifications for submissions) please visit the contest's page here. Or, if you would like to discuss the contest further, please visit the forum page here.
Happy animating!
-Schlaeps
P.S.- Just a hint for the judging, we will be grading on merit, so, for instance, a clip with a minifig jogging would not score as high as a car driving through a billboard.
I received an email this morning from the "Adirondack Manufacturing Corporation" (of which Cynthia Price's (the current owner of brickfilms) husband is the President) claiming trademark infringement on the domain name "ilovebrickfilming.com" (infringement on the term "Brickfilms"). I suppose I should have seen this coming, and I apologize to all of you that warned me about this, I should have listened. I haven't decided a course of action yet and I would love any input from you fine folks. Obviously if they have a problem with "ilovebrickfilming" they'll have a problem with "brickfilmers" too so it's likely that we'll have to revote on a name. A discussion is going on in this thread on the forums. For those of you that are interested I have uploaded a formatted version of the email here. "Peaceful coexistance". Right.
-Jonathan
Alright guys, just a quick update to keep you all informed as to what is happening with Brickfilmers.com. :) First of all, I am still working on it. Very hard in fact. I've actually recently had to reduce the time I spend on it so that I could ensure that I graduate highschool. Second, we've ran into a little trouble. It's nothing detrimental to the health of the site but it has put a kink in our timeframe. The forum software that we're using (PunBB) is excellent. It's lightweight, easy on the server, and the newest builds of it (including the one we're using) make integration, upgrading, and adding features easier than anything currently available. Unfortunately, the people that create the software are pretty much going through the same split up Brickfilms / Brickfilmers went through. A commercial company bought out the PunBB software and the developers didn't like the way it was going and decided to create their own. Thankfully, PunBB (right now) is still open-source and therefore allowed the developers to fork the code into what they call "FluxBB". The issue is, with the move of the software (we'll be taking the FluxBB route) comes dozens of minor, but vital, changes to the software, renaming of functions that were branded with "PunBB" or "Pun" in them mostly. Moving all our pages over to the new software (including the forums) requires that I go through every page and fix the badly named functions and variables. This, as you might have guessed, is tedious and time consuming. However! I have been able to fix most of the pages now and I am just about ready to move on to more feature development. More screencasts and a beta signup will hopefully happen within the next few weeks. Assuming that we're able to get things the way you want it the first time, we should be able to get the site fully functional and public in about a month. :) I hope that explains what's been happening and gives you something to look forward to. :)
Yours,
-Jonathan
Things are moving very fast in the Brickfilmers.com development lane. The entire site is coming along marvelously (perhaps slightly ahead of schedule) and I'd like to start sharing a little more with you guys what the site will be like. :) So without further to do, I introduce to you the first Brickfilmers.com screencast (featuring the film addition page)!
We're all really excited about this feature so let us know what you think about/want from it in the comments!
-The ILB/Brickfilmers.com Team
P.S. Check out the new RSS feed!
With the new site name / design / logo having been chosen (It'll look sort of like this) and my spring break now over, the new website is under construction!
XHTML markup has been completed and the forums have already been integrated with the theme (it's awesome). We're working on putting together the film directory and private messaging systems and then we'll work on getting the resources and events underway. Hopefully the entire process will only take a week or two and we'll keep you updated on the progress!
Thank you to all of you who are concerned about the contents of my personal site (Schlaeps.com) which was suspended during my sudden removal from Brickfilms. I received an email this morning (the 12th) with a link (and nothing else) to a .rar compressed version of the site within an ominous folder that indicated my files would be removed in 24 hours. I downloaded the rar (which took nearly all day on my rather miserable internet connection) only to find it was corrupted. Yay.
So basically I have anything in my root folder than began with a-d. I emailed them again stating the issue but have not received a response back. I'll update you all as soon as possible.
UPDATE: I have finally downloaded my websites directory and am awaiting news regarding my mysql database. Another problem has arisen though, it would appear that I am not the only one to have been ousted from their hosting domain. Another long standing patron has been given the dump without warning. I won't say their name or go into much more detail because they seemed extremely upset about the matter (and rightly so, they paid for the hosting). I've emailed "Zane" about a refund but I don't expect they'll return my replies. If you do find out who it is, please don't email them. For the record, I'm thoroughly mad about this now.
This is what I know thus far.
I've had very little response from the admins so I'm still unclear about how things happened. About a week ago when the changes to the search were made, I began to see a huge shift in the way Brickfilms was running. Dozens of members began crying out for answers from the site owners and only got their threads locked after being told to "Go BrickFilm".
After seeing this and several parts of the site (including an upcoming youtube clone and what would appear to be the disabling of the wiki) begin to change dramatically like this I began to worry for the ideal of brickfilms as a whole. Whether or not this site would be the same place it used to be ever again. So I started working on another site. To be clear, I never wanted to directly "compete" with brickfilms. I just wanted to have a place to work on actually brickfilming rather than having ads thrust down my throat while the community goes insane from a lack of information. I called it "I Brickfilming" in light of this. I expected to be kicked from the site or to step down as admin after revealing it. I couldn't imagine that having something like that would make them very happy. Upon completing the placeholder for the site I sent a link to a forum member whom I trust very much and wanted to know some answers and what I planned to do about this. I responded with as many answers as I could and then gave her a link to the site. After that (and I'm just guessing on this part) the higher ups got a whiff of my site from someone (I'm not sure who or how) and then proceeded to either be given the contents of my private messages or search the database for them (I'm guessing the latter due to the person I was PMing with). Upon finding this I believe they waited a few days before disabling my website/hosting account here and then removing all privileges I had on the site. I never received any contact from the owners and was only told what a few ministers had seen in the Ministers forum (where the owners apparently explained everything). The only email I got was several hour after and concerned the removal of the brickfilms logo from the ilovebrickfilming.com site (which I had already done a few minutes before the email arrived). After replying to the email asking for answers I received a response basically confirming my beliefs in the above events and then said they tried to keep it from the community to "salvage my dignity". I'm not ashamed of what I did and I stand behind it fully. I leave it up to you to decide the ethics of the situation. Whether it was right of me to build another site devoted to the hobby. Whether it was right of them to search my PMs. Whether it was right to lock up my site and label me as a "wannabe" (as seen on the left above my avatar).
-Schlaeps
No. This isn't the final site name. :P
We're in the process of brainstorming name ideas. This is just a temporary place to put them. If you'd like to suggest one, post it in the comments! We'll pick out the best and let you guys vote on which one you want.
-Jonathan
Welcome to ilovebrickfilming.com! I know that there are a lot of questions regarding what happened (we have some too) so post in the comments what you want to know and we'll try our hardest to answer them as soon as possible. :)
I would like to know if it's a possibility that the site may have been hacked. It is possible, but I don't think it happened. If it did I had nothing to do with it.
Are you banned from the forums? No, but all of my privileges have been removed.
As of right now, Revmen you (Schlaeps), or anybody else on Brickfilms.com doesn't have any control over the site now, correct? The network is completely running it? I think Rev still has administrative powers, but that's all.
What happened? It's a long story, but the short of it is. I began work on this site about a week ago. I sent a link to a member via PM and they (apparently) discovered it that way. I did expect to get the boot after they discovered this, but I would have hoped that they would have contacted me beforehand. The fact that they've gone through my personal messages on brickfilms is also concerning.
May I ask what will become of this site, and the forums as well? This site will be under construction for a week or two. We'll continue to keep you updated via the blog (and upcoming RSS feed) on what the site will look like, ask your opinions on what you think is needed, what you want / don't want, etc.
is the cake REALLY a lie? I... don't know what you're talking about...
Why did you start making ilovebrickfilming in the first place? When I first saw Brickfilms beginning to go down the tubes I only saw bad things ahead. I thought that it would be wise, to have a place to go back to for the original ideal that Brickfilms was created under. To just have a place to share, grow, and learn about the hobby. Brickfilms is now a commercial venue. A way to make money. That's not what I signed up for when I started working on Brickfilms. That's not what I signed up for when I registered as a user in 2004. I joined because I like making lego guys walk and I wanted to get better at it and share my creations with other people. That's what this site is about.
Will Dave still be Minister of Milkshakes? Abso-freaking-lutely.
So, what exactly is this "link" you sent someone? A new redesign plan for the site or something? It was essentially this site minus the blog and had a Brickfilms.com logo on the top.
-Jonathan Schlaepfer Former Admin of Brickfilms.com