A while ago, I produced a quick Chima short called Stink. It’s thirty seconds long, and is essentially just a fart joke, but I hadn’t planned to do it as a one-off. At the time, the plan was to create a bunch of shorts like this, twenty seconds to two minutes maximum each. That was last November, and complications since then meant I moved onto other projects. Good complications - my college coursework film, working with BrickUltra - but complications nonetheless.

However, I don’t plan to give up on this altogether. Chima’s a fun theme, and it looks like it’s here to stay, plus I have a reasonable amount of canon that I planned to use that’s sitting on my hard drive.

My idea was this: as a community, we could have a kind of ‘Chima rush’, in which over a period of time, multiple brickfilmers could produce one or two shorts. When I say short, the parameters are twenty seconds to an maximum of two minutes. I’ll post all of my material here and if you want to produce a short, funny Chima animation, you can take what you like from this list and use it.

It’s a very loose collaboration, but I always find that working on something short can be a good outlet to develop new animation techniques, or storytelling skills (packing something engaging into a short time frame is a good lesson to learn). You might even make a Chima short as part of the animation challenge.

Even if you don’t know Chima that well, you can still take part. There’s plenty of wiki information to help, I’m here to answer questions, and there are quite a lot of cheaper Chima sets (plus the polybags go cheap on ebay a lot as well). This isn’t me trying to harass anyone into taking part, but please don’t feel excluded if you do want to have a go.

Like I said before, each animation should only be short, as that’s the point of this. The only reason I’ve specifically said ‘Chima’ is I think it’d be fun and different, there aren’t many Chima brickfilms, and there’s room for a lot of expansion and creativity.

The only word of caution is that you may want to post roughly what you’re doing before you start, just to make sure you don’t end up making the same film as someone else, especially if you choose the script I’ve put on OneDrive.

Here is the link to ‘Chima Box’ where you can see the material I had so far. There are some additional histories, ideas for new tribes and character names, etc.

This isn’t a contest or a challenge, and there’s no set deadline or anything - you could make one now or in three months’ time - it’s essentially just a suggestion for something you could do if you’re at a loss for ideas between larger projects. I hope someone picks one of these up, or is inspired to make something from it, but I won’t be offended if nothing comes of this. I don’t want to mess up anyone’s BRAWL plans or other projects, it’s just if you have a lazy Sunday or are particularly keen on doing this.

I still plan to make the odd Chima short here and there, but I’ll try to do it from material I haven’t made public so that I don’t then cut into anyone else’s brickfilms.

That’s it for this post. I thought it was a good idea. I may be wrong, but there’s no harm in throwing it out there.

Thoughts? Anyone interested?

"Nothing goes down 'less I'm involved. No nuggets. No onion rings. No nothin'. A cheeseburger gets sold in the park, I want in! You got fat while we starved on the streets...now it's my turn!" -Harley Morenstein