Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
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So I have to do a little more green screening 
(which I always hate) and I thought I would have to do the different minifigs on different screens (one blue and the other green) but this actually seems to be a somewhat passable green screen composite. There is the tiniest green tint on the dude with the green shirts helmet, but I'm out of lights and space to make the key better, and it's pretty passable as it is.
I'd maybe try to cover up the green that shows up on his goggles in photoshop or something, as it's pretty distracting, but I don't think the green on the bottom of the helmet will be noticeable in video. If the shot is really short then I think you're probably fine.
The green screening did not turn out when I animated it so I had to redo my whole lighting setup, end the end it was much better
My eyes would like to go on strike from my body.
And for the record I have decided to film them on seperate backdrops, one blue the other green. What you see in this image is a white poster board that has a strong light with a green gel and some diffusion on it in the background. You can see the rim light in the background.
AND IT'S A WRAP
OK, after for years the animation for this project is done. I'll spend the next month working on editing, special FX and sound effects. It's around 6:31 with credits and titles right now, I may loose around 5-10 sec at this point.
I am hoping to wrap up post production by late September, my plan is to rent a local theater that is really cheap to rent and invite everyone I know to come out and see some of my older films followed by this film and have a Q&A afterward. Then I'll invite everyone back to my place, get a keg of beer and have a wrap party! My 30 birthday is in late September WOO!
How the screening goes will determine when the film goes online, if it goes poorly I will see if there is anything I can do to make it better within reason. If it goes well but without a extremely positive response I'll put it online shortly afterward. If people respond REALLY well I might hand onto it and submit it to a few festival and it probably won't be available till next year.
If it does turn out really good and I submit to festivals people that want to see it early will have to back the Bricks In Motion documentary's Kickstarter to see it before anyone else does on the DVD. But I don't know if it's good enough, at this point I can't think objectively about it.
I hope to get a trailer cut together in the next week.
Congrats on finally finishing this up. Chris. It looks like it's taken you a very long time, but it looks awesome.
A hearty congratulations to you, sir. I'm really excited to see the finished film! 
Thanks guys! I'm actually a total lier, after work I had enough energy to go to my art space and re-animate the travel maps shot which had been bothering me a bit. While acceptable the animation was very strait forward and not much fun, so I redid it and I am super glad I did, I then realized I should add a quick transitional map scene between two other shots and knocked out a 3 second quickly and the film flows a lot better now. But I'm done with animation for reals now.
If I had got a really poor nights sleep and had been utterly exhausted I would not have shot these scenes, but after a sleeping on it I decided that I was not going to let that sup-par animation fly since I still had the set built and every thing.
I also had a good chat with my audio producer/composer and we when over a few things I should re-record to get the best quality, and it looks like he will be tweaking my voice acting to really bring it up to snuff, he has more years of experience in audio production then I have making movies so I am really grateful that. With his experience I think this might just be my first film to sound like a real movie. He might be bringing on another musician for score while he works on more textural audio. It's great to work with people that actually know what they are doing, sound is something I'm clueless at.
Film now has a title:
I've been going back and forth between 'Beyond the Eleventh Dimension' and 'Terror from the Eleventh Dimension' for the last couple weeks, most people seemed to like 'Terror' better then 'Beyond' but I didn't do a mock up of both titles until today.
Once I had a side by side comparison of 'Terror From The Eleventh Dimension' and 'Beyond The Eleventh Dimension' I really felt that from a visual stand point 'Beyond The Eleventh Dimension' makes a much stronger statement, I ended up using Impact on 'Terror' which I don't like as much as the font I went with on 'Beyond' but 'Beyond's font had the worst looking 'R' in the history of typeface. I sure as hell don't really care about the actual words in the title, when I made 'True Love Waits' that title was basically me throwing a temper tantrum about how much I hate naming my own films (or any of my art in general) words are the worst, I hate them so much. You can see the loser title below:
This weekend after wrapping up all the shooting I walked through the movie shot by shot to see how much post work I had to do, turns out I had 52 special effects shots that need to be completed before the movie is done, even though many of these effects are simple things like animated text overlays that is a monstrous amount of work still left. 2/3s of the shots in this film turned out to be SFX shots, that is pretty crazy.
The whole week had left me pretty exhausted so I spent the better part of Saturday vegetating, with a bit of Dr. Who thrown in the mix for good measure. I dragged my feet getting started today but I did get six of the sfx shots in the can, mostly a bunch of low hanging fruit, but it's better then nothing. Two of the shots were animated text overlays, I had cut the shots pretty short in the edit because without the text to read you get pretty board with just staring at an establishing shot after a couple seconds, but with the text I ended up extending them back to there original lengths, timeline is sitting right around 6:37 currently.
In adition to the effects work my audio producer lent me a toy to use while doing the re-recording I need to get done. He also walked me through the best way to set up a recording area that doesn't sound to awful at my home.
That looks great in full resolution, I love all the grain and texture of it.
Have you considered grading the film with a plugin like Filmconvert in order to give it the true coloration and texture of older movies shot on film? I love Filmconvert and the results it produces are very effective in emulating film, from the grain to the subtle coloration differences from a Canon DSLR. I feel like it would really add to the aesthetic you're going for.
I don't know if you've been doing any color grading work on your film yet, but I definitely recommend Filmconvert. Or, if you're interested, I have some color grading tools including Filmconvert and I'd be willing to color grade the film, I am looking to widen my portfolio in that area.
The blue cloud in the back was actually shot at 720p on my Rebel SL1 and was some of the grainiest footage shot in the cloud tank but I really like the way it looks, I don't think there is an issue up-scaling it. I added a bit of digital noise and then blured the text layer a bit so it would match the live action footage better, it looks even better when everything is moving.
I have a ways to go before I really think about grading. Does Filmconvert work with CS3? (Nope just looked up system reqs and it needs CS5.5 or higher) I got the CS3 Production Premium Suite years ago and it still works well for what I am doing which makes me really hesitant to spend money Creative Cloud, my version of Encore even supports blu-ray burning. I would love to get my film looking like it was early technicolor or something, I may not get it fully graded to my satisfaction by my screening, which I am planning to use as a test screening to see if I need to do any final editing tweaks before sending it out, either to festival or to the internet.
Apparently, it only works with CS5.5 and later. You can (and I have) dump Filmconvert on top of a basically finished product and get decent results, though obviously it's preferable to tweak it shot by shot.
If you end up buying it, the code "bloom" gives you a 10% off discount. The demo puts watermarks on everything.
Things are getting close, I have a trailer out!
This week I got more dialog that I needed to re-record done in my brand new blanket recording studio
That trailer looks awesome! I can't wait to get this DVD.
That looks great in full resolution, I love all the grain and texture of it.
Have you considered grading the film with a plugin like Filmconvert in order to give it the true coloration and texture of older movies shot on film? I love Filmconvert and the results it produces are very effective in emulating film, from the grain to the subtle coloration differences from a Canon DSLR. I feel like it would really add to the aesthetic you're going for.
I don't know if you've been doing any color grading work on your film yet, but I definitely recommend Filmconvert. Or, if you're interested, I have some color grading tools including Filmconvert and I'd be willing to color grade the film, I am looking to widen my portfolio in that area.
What about DaVinci Resolve 11 Lite? It's a free application and it's a pretty awesome program to grade footage in. I use it all the time to convert, edit, and grade my Blackmagic DNG files in. But if I'm just working in Premiere Pro CC I use the three-way color wheel and I get some pretty god results in it.
Currently the goals are, visual effects, sound effects, then grading, so I have a bit to go before I really get into the color, I will be looking into this stuff when I'm a bit closer to compleation
was that a shure ksm32 mic?
Yes Gentry, it is a KSM32, I am REALLY happy that I am able to borrow it for recording as it outclasses my mic by leaps and bounds, it's my sound producer Mat Fay's, speaking of him this is at his sound space were I did my first audio production session with him, we managed to get about 2 miniuets of the movies sound down in 3-4 hours
I am really glad I am working with Mat, he has been working with audio for longer then I have been making films, the difference between the raw recording that I captured and the finalized tracks is just incredible, if I can I will probibly try to get an audio producer for every film after this film, his experience is invaluable.
That's awesome! I own the KSM32, so I too enjoy the beautiful audio it is capable of producing:)
So I am currently faced with some setbacks.
Last week I knocked out two audio sessions with my sound guy Matt, after the first I figured we could lay out the whole track in 3-5 sessions but after session two we figured at the rate we are going it is going to take another 8-10 sessions to finish it.
Looks like I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the 'noise getto' behind the Old Rainier Brewery
Overall this is a good thing, Matt is a wizard, it's his first time laying out the soundscape for a movie, however he has been working on sound mastering for longer then I have been making movies, and he wants to use this movie as his calling card. That way once he starts asking for industry rates people will line up and demand that he take their money. I'm getting the old messenger discount. Right now we are getting about 2 sessions in a week so hopefully we can finish in the next month.
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