It's been a while since I've made a film, a (I think it's been at least two years) about a year ago I started making a musical about an evil scientist who wanted to steal hair from the dead because he was balding, but do it ended up becoming a living toupee and terrorizing the village, sadly this project fell through because I moved to Seattle and the guy doing my music stayed in Moses Lake. I remember trying to do some more stuff down the road only to discover my field recorder stopped working, which really killed any motivation I had.

After nearly a year of living in Seattle I was pretty settled in and not having some kind of project going had really been bothering me, so I went to B&H and started looking at field recorders. I ended up getting a recorder that hooks into my iPod and this shotgun mic. The new audio equiptment is so much better then the old M-Audio recorder and Shure SM57 I was using before.

On my only day off a few weeks back I sat down and wrote a script for a new LEGO film, and I'm really excited about it. I remember after I had finished writing it one of my room mates came home and I let her read it and she was laughing through the entire script. I built the set for the opening establishing shot but realized my light gels had been lost in all the moving. I can't properly function without gels, I figured I could bike out to my bike shop and ask the mechanic Niki (the only local photographer I know, check out her stuff) where I could get some gels locally. It turns out she was interested in the film and is interested in helping me, so I may do some animation (or at least set building and lighting) with her. She also pointed me to Glazer's Camera Supply which had everything I needed.

You may have already seen the opening shot:

Opening Shot For New Film by Chris 'Beard', on Flickr

I was able to bribe some voice actors with beer and we all had an absolute blast recording the bulk of the films audio. For the record the film has three scientists, two of which are played by real scientists

I later edited down the recording sessions and built the first set that would actually contain animation. I needed a very complex lighting set up with animated lighting effects and the whole setup was lousy for animation but the visuals turned out pretty awesome. It took me the better part of two days just to set up the shot and another two days to animate the scene (two shots, a total of 27 seconds) I didn't have a frame grabber and was shooting blind, but I only had to redo one of the shots. This is the nightmare I had to sit in as I animated, I sat on the orange lid that was on top of a paint can.

scene 1 set by Chris 'Beard', on Flickr

Here is part of a frame from the shot:

For Science by Chris 'Beard', on Flickr

I'll try to keep you updated on the progress and avoid blatant spoilers.