What a huge amount of work, but it was really worth it, we love the result.
We really enjoyed every episode of the History of Brickfilms. All of them are very very interesting.
Thanks for making this and we're looking forward to next episode! 

Fantastic work! Very informative and very entertaining to watch. You can see all the hard work that has been put into this amazing video. I love it! I love your work. I'm looking forward to the next part. Seriously, you could teach brickfilm history at a university.

YouTube Channel : All My Links ↑Click for newest animation!↑

I thought I knew a lot about brickfilm history but that mindstorm shower scene really suprised me

This was great, I really enjoyed it. There's some absolute classics showcased here I had completely forgotten about, so it was great to see them again after all this time. I physically cringed at seeing Fart Competition again after nearly 20 years. What was I thinking?!?

What an excellent documentary. The research you have put into this is very in-depth, and I can't wait to see the next installment. This is a must-watch for any fan of brickfilming who is interested in how it started out. As someone who discovered brickfilming in 2003, it was wonderful going down memory lane and rediscovering so many old films through this video.

I remember getting one of the LEGO Studios sets for Christmas in 2001 or 2002: the Exploding Bank set. It was my first dip in using LEGO to tell stories, although it took a could of years before I got into brickfilming. Back then, I had no idea that there even was a LEGO Studios kit! I don't think it was marketed very well in the Netherlands.

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Something I would like to touch upon a bit more is how much of a hassle it was to view a brickfilm back then. (This is based on my experiences in 2003-2004, but it also applies to the 2000-2002 era.) The internet was in a very early stage. Video compression was still primitive, meaning either you had a huge file size, or an awful image quality. (In many cases, both. More experienced brickfilmers would usually offer high-quality  and low-quality versions to download.) Internet speeds were also a lot slower back then, so even small files could take a while to download. It would generally take much more time to download a video than to watch it.

That is, if you could get the video to play at all. Because oh boy, if you didn't have the right codec or software installed, you went through all that trouble for nothing. If it was a .AVI or .MPEG, you could usually watch it in Windows Media Player. That is, if you had the specific video compression installed. I remember the hassle of downloading DivX and XviD codecs, but there were probably many others. There were also alternative codecs: QuickTime and RealMedia were big, but they required their own software (QuickTime Player or RealPlayer) to play the files. As a 13 year old Dutch kid whose English was limited to the very basics, it was very difficult to navigate through all this. I missed out on a lot of brickfilms because either they took too long to download, or I couldn't get them to work.

And all that was just to watch a brickfilm! Imagine being a young brickfilmer who is trying to share his films. The LEGO Studios software did probably help a lot, although I have never used it myself. Instead I relied on free software like Anasazi Stop Motion Animator, VideoMach (2.7.2 or die), and Windows Movie Maker. Even with this software, you had to have a decent grasp of video compression to get a usable video file at the end.

And then you still had to find a way to get it onto the internet! There were virtually no platforms where you could just upload your video file. A lot of these early brickfilms were shared by people who had their own website, or had a Geocities page. (Small aside: this also meant that you needed to build your own website. I think a lot of us pre-YouTube brickfilmers have some HTML knowledge because of this.) In later years this got a little bit easier. I recall Brickshelf.com being used a lot to upload video files, but Brickshelf wasn't a very reliable host. It had a tendency to go down for days at a time with no word about whether it was gone forever or not.

You youngsters have no idea how much trouble we had to go through to scratch our leggo muvvey itch! shakes fist at sky

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Last of all, a (very incomplete) selection of some of my favorite films from the 2000-2002 era. These are the films that pop in my mind whenever I think of those times.

A Christmas Carol in Bricks and The Barber of Sevilla. Both of these were made by Yellowhead Studios, a Dutch brickfilmer. ACCIB was probably the first brickfilm I ever watched; a television program had a short item on it, interviewing the director.

Brain Damage, in my opinion a quintessential example of the "fight film with cool music" genre that was really quite popular back then.

Twelve Bucks. A very cinematic experience, especially at the time. Young me didn't quite understand this one the first time.

The Gauntlet and Rise of the Empire, both by Jay Silver, another big figure. Rise of the Empire was one of those films that blew your mind, because the quality was so much above most films from the same era.

Amazone, another film by a Dutch creator.

Also Thwacked Zarathustra

The Animator. Not much to say about this one except it's short and sweet.

Fart Competition: Part 4. Reading this thread it sounds like WeirdEars isn't too proud of this series, but I am not ashamed to admit I still laugh every time I see it.

Great work on another exciting and informative installment! I actually own a small hand full of those old LEGO Studios sets, and have been thinking about getting more. They all look so cool - and it's awesome to, even now, spot some of those elements (the cardboard backdrops, dino foot and head, etc) in brickfilms.

Glad you showed off some of the Hanger films and Batman Revenge too - I enjoy both of those, and think they're definitely underappreciated. Batman Revenge, especially, was very inspirational to me.

Also, I think it's a cool tidbit of history to know that LEGO at one point planned for the whole movie making competition to become a yearly thing. Obviously, the non impressive sales of LEGO Studios coupled with their back and forth struggles with bankruptcy at the time prematurely ended this - however, just think how cool it would have been had they been able to have continued this yearly brickfilm competition? We'd be at what, they're 18th or 19th installment by now? Ha ha.

All around excellent video. Very well researched and put together (as usual) and a very entertaining watch. I think it's cool to highlight some of the brickfilms & brickfilm friendly sets from this era, as although they were made in the internet age, a lot of films from this time period (and even since) are at risk of being lost forever through website closures, forum restructurings, and creators simply taking their videos down. I'm glad we still have a lot of this history because of the efforts of not only yourself but of the brickfilm archive too!

A few years ago I made the decision to start experimenting more with non-LEGO elements in my films, partially out of the intrigue some of these older films gave me. A lot of them utilize clay, model train kits, and other accessories in set design and environments - and I really like the look it gives. Perhaps it's a little less toyetic than exclusively using LEGO, but I think it's really cool.

Looking forward to the next video, but no rush. Took me a while to get around to watching this one (and I'm so glad I did) and I'm sure the next episode will be just as great - if not more so. So glad someone's preserving and presenting brickfilming history (and pre history ) in a professional TV doc style format. It's like I'm watching a History Channel series just about my favorite hobby.

Thanks for making this series! Here's to the future!