I noticed it after finishing the shot and didn't have time to redo it, yeah.  It is pretty much hidden from view by the building and minifig though; the actual passing through the mountain is obscured.  The whole thing was done on a rather tight deadline, though admittedly I wasn't aiming for realism, the whole thing was meant to have a fairly cartoony look to it.

The contest asked for entries to have an "emotional" element to them, which is why I included live action in it.  I would have written my own music but was concerned because of their licensing restrictions on outside music, so I decided it wasn't worth the headache and used the pre-provided music from the contest.  They did note in judging materials that the soundtrack of the films wouldn't be considered in the judging process, so it was low on my priority list.

I have to agree with Gppwhatever. I didn't notice that cgi fault, but it wasn't that great like everyone says. It is good, but I don't think it really deserves the "staff favourite". IMO.

Well for me this was full of win. Smeagol plays to his strengths which is definately the CG bricks.
I'm curious how you kept the sync between the ship and the CG in the camera tracking shot at 0:45.
Was it a fluke, did you use camera tracking software or another more manual technique?
And I agree it was much better than many of the winning entries.

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Hehe, I get comments like this all the time. I'm sure if you keep following gppproductions he will make a positive review. And just because he may enjoy nitpicking or have different tastes (I'm guilty of both crimes myself) doesn't mean he's jealous. And please dont Pearl Harbour his animation, that's a cowardly and rather pathetic thing to do just because he didn't like your movie. I know because I did this myself - and grew out of it. I suggest you do the same. I also suggest you improve your punctuation....

Now I've got that out of the way, the movie:

I did really like it. The concept was great, and the CG was (as usual) really good. I also liked the building sequences, and the animation was nice and smooth. However, I'm comparing this to Smeagol's REALLY high standards, so I have a few really cruel nitpicks:

The CG was composited brilliantly, but it didn't seem as polished or as well blended as Smeagol's past stuff. The CG stuck out against the real bricks much more than before, though this could just be due to Smeagol working with a brighter colour palette than before. I dunno, it was just something that I had a problem with....blame my weirdness.....

The music wasn't anything of note. Thats all I have to say. The sound effects were fine though - apart from the bit when we had a close up of the troll and Knight fighting, with Sword sound effects, and then we cut to just a few feet away....and the sound is gone? Where did it go? They are only fighting a few feet away, surely you would still be able to hear it, just a bit more quieter? I've seen re-enactments, and swords are actually quite loud in real life - although the sound is more dull than in the movies.

Finally, the live action part was a little cheesy. The actors were good though (did you shoot that part?)

That is all. These are only really small nitpicks, and they dont detract from the enjoyment much.

-MRB

I shot the live action part, yeah.  Kinda had to work with what I had available to me as far as actors, but like I said the whole reason for the live action parts was to bring some "emotion" to it as per the contest prompt.

The CG is cartoony and unrealistic because I tried to make everything somewhat cartoony and realism wasn't something I was aiming for.  In Unrenewable I really put a fair amount of work into making all the CG components sort of gritty and highly textured so they'd be realistic, I was trying to make that stuff blend as well as I could with the sets.  Here I just wanted good color and bright lighting, and didn't care too much if the CG nature of some of the stuff was clear given this is a colorful galaxy of LEGO inside a brick.

The ship in that shot (as well as the one after) is completely computer generated.  So nothing is real in the shot at 0:45.

I did a lot of work to get the boat and rock cliff and submarine elements in the Atlantis shot toward the beginning though to get the camera movements to match, and the foreground of rocks and minifigs at 0:50 is real, so in those shots I manually matched the CG and the camera movements.

Really fantastic job! The CGI was awesome! Who were the people in this anyhow?

LSP, there...was stop motion in this.