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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Beyond the Eleventh Dimension
Carp from the eleventh dimension are invading the earth, will unfreezing the Inter-dimensional Police be enough to save the world?
I started filming this in 2010 and almost gave up a few times, but it's finally here and it's been worth the wait!
Nice achievement! An unprecedented standard of set polish and scale.
Last edited by VN (February 13, 2016 (06:40am))
Beautiful film. Nearly everything about it is perfect. The set design was absolutely fantastic. This is one of the best brickfilms I've seen in a while.
This is true Lego cinema gold.
Very happy you did not give up on this film.
This instantly becomes my new favorite brickfilm.
It's film like this that inspire you to want to brick film.
You blended everything so well that it wasn't just a bunch of flash and no dash.
You actually cared about the story and it made this film so good.
Great job and please give us the pleasure of another film from you in the near future.
Oh yeah loved the ending.
VN and Randomboaz, thank you I'm really glad you enjoyed it.
Antonio Ferrara, this is maybe one of the nicest things someone has ever said about any film I've every made, you seriously made my day! It's taken me something like 13-15 years to get to this point and I am still learning new tricks, and if I am inspiring others to make films that should help inspire me even more to keep at it.
Also, about that ending
If you ever need an over the top patriotic picture your welcome]
Excellent job! This was extremely entertaining. I really loved the set design and lighting. This is one of the best brickfilms I've seen all year.
8/10
Fantastic!
The sets and lighting are so incredibly good...One could literally stop the film at any point and be impressed by the still image alone. That is the sign of great eye for detail.
The one complaint I have is that everything rushed around, not giving it time to breathe or really develop. It just all happened extra fast. That's not to say it's a pacing issue, because the film flowed very well and the pace did make sense. It had a rhythm to it that made it work at that speed, but moved a lot quicker than it could have....
Does that even make any sense? 
Anyway, I love the blur on the flying carp, though the car's blur may have been a tad overdone. The teleporting effect is super-sweet, yet so simple. And the whole sequence at 2:24-2:39 so over the top, and so much fun for that very fact. The map scene, like the teleporting, is a unique mix of simple and complex that just works perfectly.
Some of the animation could have been smoother, but honestly, it doesn't hurt anything. The story and other visuals keep it from being noticed much.
Congratulations on finishing this great film, and thanks for letting peek in on your progress over the years.
I started filming sometime in 2010, and it's hard to imagine working on the same film for all of this time.
Thank you for sticking with it!
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback Pritchard, would you mind looking at these two shots and telling me which motion blurred car shot you preferred before reading the spoiler?
The first shot is real motion blur, I would push the cars during a two second exposure a set distance, where as the second shot I mask the static car out from the frame and added digital motion blur, I actually like the fake blur over the real blur but it was fun to play with a mix of real and digital effects.
The one complaint I have is that everything rushed around, not giving it time to breathe or really develop. It just all happened extra fast. That's not to say it's a pacing issue, because the film flowed very well and the pace did make sense. It had a rhythm to it that made it work at that speed, but moved a lot quicker than it could have....
Does that even make any sense? mini/tongue
I understand were you are coming from, however one issue I was struggling to overcome while writing this script was having tons of unnecessary exposition. I feel like many brickfilms (and films for that matter) open by just dumping exposition on the viewer, and sometimes I find it hard to care, so I have been trying to focus on more showing and less telling, I may have been able to have a more relaxed pace with show rather then tell, but I erred on a brisker pace as I do feel like that is a safer side to err on. I feel like a longer film in the vein of Subterranean (previously Manhole) would be a better film with more pauses to give the viewer time to take things in, while a sci-fi adventure romp like this will be better with a brisk break neck pace.
I do feel like some of the storytelling was unnecessarily redundant and I could have used a few more script drafts to keep the overall story much tighter, however once I got to the point where it looked like completion was eminent I couldn't fix the script issues without cutting minuets of animation and a year or so of work.
In particular I feel like the war room scene, where Dr. Strangelove and president decide what they are going to do and the scene which follows where the president tells the Inter-dimensional police what the situation is, both cover the same ground and I could have removed one with some writing changes. Oh well, live an learn.
I'm glad you felt the pacing worked well though, even if it was faster then you would prefer, there were a few pacing issues that I discovered when most of the film was in the editor, and I added all the map scenes in the last month of filming and moved the opening with Dr. Dementia from the middle of the film to the beginning to fix these issues and it is a relief to hear that those changes worked out for the best.
I'm glad you enjoyed the scene from 2:24-2:39, I had originally planned a ghost busters-esqu battle sequence of them vs the carp, but I became so overwhelmed with the idea of shooting it and it being so visually underwhelming I decided to approach the problem from a different angle in a way I though would be humorous.
First of all; congrats on getting this done!
What a wonderful Brickfilm! Great story!
The animation is great! The production values are incredibly high; easily the best set design in Brickfilm's I have ever seen!
The tiny wee movements, of say, the US flag, the tiny movements of the minifigures here and there, add a nice charm to the whole Brickfilm overall!
Best Brickfilm I have seen in a long time!
I prefer the wide-shot in-camera blur, although neither is bad by any means. I think my issue isn't so much the blur itself, but that it sticks out from everything else in the frame being crystal-clear and sharp. So any blur would have been noticeable. And with these cars being as blurry as they were, it felt like it just wasn't right. Just didn't belong.
How about a behind the scenes? That would be great to watch.
That was one of the best Brickfilms I've seen for a long time 
Last edited by Smocktopus (June 27, 2015 (04:54pm))
Great film. The story was good and ended nicely.
The animation was good. I liked the complexity you had in some scenes. Yet at times, some pieces or minifigures 'jittered'. The sets were excellent. This is probably the brickfilm with the best set design. Lighting was also splendid and I could see how much work was put into it.
I agree with Pritchard on how rushed this video feels. I thought for the story, this should have been at least 20 minutes. There's wasn't enough time for us to learn much about any character or for us to even feel much for the story. It was a good story, don't get me wrong, but I think it should have had more talking, or some slower scenes to get us to know some characters.
Congratulations on finishing this project. I recently went through every one of your production posts and images and really enjoyed seeing what you did and how.
Rating: 8/10
Amazing, truly.
One thing i did notice were the diff. characters' voices had different sound levels and reverb, which was distracting to a small extent for me. But overall I am really glad i bought this on Blu Ray/DVD! Will go nice (along witht he other brickfilms in the collection) with my expanding DVD movie collection! Well done, Sloth. You stuck with it over the years, and produced something that will be admired for years to come by the brickfilming community, and others.
The voice acting was excellent, the sets are beautiful, the lighting was well done, the animation was fantastic, and the Dr. Strangelove reference was funny. But, the thing I liked the most was the nostalgic vibe to 80s cartoons of old, right down to the President's hairstyle. You really set up a light, fun atmosphere here, and I liked the little touches here and there. You've really impressed me, and I think the finished product more than lived up to the hype. I'm so glad I got to be around to see this thing get done. Well done, Chris.
*sniff* America.
Last edited by Mickey (June 27, 2015 (12:11pm))
One thing i did notice were the diff. characters' voices had different sound levels and reverb, which was distracting to a small extent for me.
When I started working on the sound, my audio engineer, Matt Fay told me that the recording quality of the voices so he let me borrow his KMS32 and re-record as much as I could, however I couldn't re-record all of the voices as some of the people were out of contact with me at that time, there are unfortunately a few scenes where there is a four year/$300 gap between the time recorded and the quality of the mics used. Sadly not all audio issues can be fixed with de-verb and a ton of time in Pro Logic.
But, the thing I liked the most was the nostalgic vibe to 80s cartoons of old, right down to the President's hairstyle. You really set up a light, fun atmosphere here, and I liked the little touches here and there.
Thanks, B-Movies are a HUGE part of my inspirations and I'm glad I was able to channel some of that old magic into this film.
Great film! Fantastic job on staying with this over the last 5 years, it was worth it in the end.
Oh! That was great!
From Dr. Strangelove onwards, it got my attention and never allowed me to get bored! Perfect sets, genious mechanisms, great effects and decent voice acting! Congrats!
K I have to know.
What is your favorite B film? And did you draw inspiration from that or just from the whole genre?
Wow, that's a pretty challenging questions. Plan 9 From Outer Space was one of the first non-MST3K B-Movies that really had an impact on me, I think I bought the film on a recommendation and ended up watching it four times in a row just because I was so amazed by it. I had to know who directed Plan 9, which is probably one of the reasons Ed Wood is my favorite Tim Burton film. Although for sheer entertainment value I might have to go with Robot Monster as my favorite B-Movie.
older projects, namely True Love Waits, were heavely influenced by Plan 9 and Beginning of the End, I even lifted the 'atmospheric sounds' from outer space for it.
However 'Beyond' has a bit less obvious inspiration, however Mega Piranha was released the same year and much earlier in the year and it's very likely I saw it before writing the script.
Most of the films I shot before True Love Waits were in black and white, part of this was to imitate B-Movies, but when I returned to filming in color I wanted the color to matter. There is a lot you can do with contrast in black and white that is easier then the same thing done in color, so if I was going to shoot in color I wanted the color to count, and use bold bright colors to the fullest of there potential. I probibly got as much influence for this from the likes of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven to old posters from films like Big Trouble in Little China, as far as colors go I LOVE classic b-movie posters and I try to emulate that look in my films.
And I don't think I can talk about influences without mentioning Spite Your Face's All of the Dead, this film changed the way I made b-movie parodies, if you watch My first LEGO film you'll note we have parody elements but things often fall pretty flat. All of the Dead made me relize that you you parody this stuff, you need to take what you love about the genre and make it as good as you can, it's about catching the spirit of those films and if you intentionally make things bad you get an awkward film like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. I've kind of rambled but hopefully that gives a gimps into my creative process.
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