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!
A place to discuss, share, and create stop motion films.
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Grounds of Freedom EP01
This is the first video in a Youtube series examining the topic of Freedom. It was created with a hybrid digital workflow. It is all based on still photographs instead of 3D models, but brought to life in Adobe Character Animator. We'd love to hear people's feedback on the content and the workflow approach. More details can be provided if people want to know more about how we did it.
Hiya, welcome to the forums!
You have a very interesting approach to brickfilming here! It's an interesting combination of stop-motion animation and digital animation and I think it works very well overall. Being used to pure stop motion, it took me a minute to get over the extra "bendiness" you give the characters (with their heads going up and down especially), but you don't overdo it and really made it work.
One thing I think you could improve on is blending the stop motion better with the digital animation. Some of the digital animation (like the heads bending) is very smooth, but then when for example someone takes a sip of their drink, the frame rate of that is very low. It makes for a bit of a jarring experience. I'd recommend choosing one frame rate that you can use to both digitally animate and do stop motion with. The facial animation (lip sync) looked to be somewhere in between - maybe you could base it off of that?
Content-wise it was a delightful watch. It really didn't feel like I watched a 5 minute movie - it just flew by and a lot of that is because of the great writing. The little jokes are not laugh-out-loud funny, which I think is perfect for a film that tackles a subject in a pretty serious way. At some points the film did feel a bit like I was watching a lecture, but overall I think you strike a great balance: it's fun to watch while being informative.
Again, I love how you combined stop motion animation with digital animation. It makes for a very cool style! Can't wait for episode 2.
BertL,
Glad you liked it. We tried to keep the non-realistic bending motions to a minimum, while still utilizing them to add life to the characters. The arm motions and other low FPS layer cycling is based on real motions, so the fps is limited by the number of intermediate frames. Our focus was on efficiency, because while it took a very long time to create the framework, we can now create content fairly quickly. We can record each character in real-time with a web cam, although the final compositing takes much longer to render. We will have a new episode every week this month, (due to a bit of a backlog) and hopefully monthly thereafter. We wanted the visuals to be compelling, but didn't want to get so caught up in that aspect that we weren't able to communicate the more important messages.
As promised, here is some of the information on how we make the films:
http://www.groundsoffreedom.com/about/
Working on videos to demonstrate our process as well, but that may be another couple weeks.
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