Lego breakthrough!

Our quest for Lego has reached its end! 
Although I did contact my sister to try to get Lego from the Lego shop, this wasn't necessary. I actually found that my brother was hoarding Lego in his cupboard and on his shelves, and probably in his house that he actually lives in too. 
We now have 2 cowboys, 2 skeletons, 2 zombies (although these are pirate zombies because they came from the Pirates of the Caribbean set, but we can switch the bodies) a variety of accessories, some suitable vegetation and some sandy coloured bases. 

We have arranged to shoot as much as possible at my house on Thursday 23rd Febuary, and we will continue this in the following week. 

Looking for Lego

After researching Lego we decided to try to find some suitable lego figures to use. We looked in Boswells as it has a nice lego department, but there was only starwars and other models that weren't helpful for our project.
We have decided to ask my sister (who lives within walking distance of an official lego shop) to look for some cowboy and/or zombie lego. If she can't find any for us we will construct our own using our own lego collections.

Research into Lego animations

Information from WikiHow.com:

Build and stage your set, this could be 100% Lego, a real world scene or a combination of the two. Be sure to look through the camera you'll be using, to get a sense of how your video will look. While you're doing this you can check for unwanted elements that need to be covered up or camouflaged, especially in the background.

Next get the Lego minifigure actors ready. As the stock minifig heads are very static you may want to have a few suitable heads ready to go if you'd like for your actors to be expressive. If you can't find heads that work you could always paint some yourself.

Position the starting scene of your movie and your camera keeping in mind that it is imperative that the camera be immobilized; otherwise your finished video will be jerky. Use a tripod or similar device to keep the camera still, then take the picture.

Now it is time to move the actors in your scene, but just a little bit. It is easiest to move the character about two paces on the platform or about half an inch on the floor. Continue this until you are done with your movie.

Use any stop motion application on your computer that can make variable fps time settings. preferably one that can set up to 15fps, It will give the best results.

Sequence your shots in a video editing program and ensure that each shot has an equal duration.

This is an example of a Lego man. His legs and arms can move vertically, but not out horizontally. (This shouldn't be an issue when they are zombies.) Their heads can swivel all the way round and they can bend backwards or forward at the hip joint; again not side to side. It will be easy for the Hero to hold a weapon, for example a light-saber, as the Lego hands are designed to do so. Also as demonstrated by the above Lego man's Darth Vader costume, accessories can be added to give them more of a character. 

Zombie Lego is available:

The last zombie is demonstrating the generic zombie walk which we will adopt in out film opening, and the first is demonstrating the ability to hold weapons or meat. 


Cowboys are also available, so we can use their accessories and/or bodies to give more context to the zombies, and also use them for the humans.


Here are some examples of what we could use for "The Hero":

And this could be used for the "Little Guy". He doesn't have such a manly face, in comparison to the "Hero" figures he looks slightly dazed and deluded. Also his clothes are more colourful and less dangerous looking.

Sandy coloured Lego platforms are also available, and cacti are as well, so we could use a cactus as the object that the "Little Guy" crashes into, and also include them in the mise-en-scene. 
I have a green-screen and good film lighting, so adding a backdrop would not be a problem, and the posters could be made of small paper easily.(I have experience of making small paper things for Lego men)

Correspondence about the situation

To Mr. Wroe:

Hi,

Because the hard-drive with all of our work on it broke we no longer have our original footage, first or second draft. We did download the 1st draft from Youtube, but it's gonna be really difficult to edit. So we're considering re-making the whole thing. We wondered if it would be ok for us to do it in stop-motion animation instead?

We probably wouldn't have enough time to re-film it in live-action because of mocks and difficulty getting people and what not, so we were thinking it may be alot easier to make a stop-motion using lego men. We have the resources for good mise-en-scene (we can actually use a desert now cause of chroma key and such) and we have good lighting and equipment so it wouldn't look shoddy. It would be much easier to re-make quicker, also we could easily cover all areas in the mark scheme. (Mise-en-scene, angles, shot distances, typography, etc.)

Would it be ok for us to do that instead? Are there any disadvantages? 

Thanks

Rosie and Clara 

From Mr. Wroe:

Dear Both,

Sorry to hear about the hard drive - blog about it! Copy your messages to the blogs to document what you're doing.

Have you tried a specialist computer place to retrieve the material? Computer Assistance on Oxford Road (very top of Cowley Road) are very good.

As regards the animation, fine in principle. Good that you're paying attention to the Mark Scheme. My advice to you would be to add research into lego animation on to your blogs - best to deal in rushes of 100 or so images at a time for example to avoid computers crashing. Also, I would be inclined to look at some examples from Art of the Title.com - particularly the work of Saul Bass, and pay a lot of attention to the typography and in animating that. Many films don't have actual footage for the titles, they use elaborate typography and transitions and title boards with the music over instead.

Good luck with it all and I hope that you can recover your original material after all.

Mr Wroe

Update on our predicament

As mentioned in the last post we lost everything. (We no longer have original footage, sound, 1st draft, 2nd draft, etc. Literally everything is gone.)
We downloaded the 1st draft from Youtube t try to re-edit that, but it is going to be very difficult given that it is in a non-editable format. (1 block of video rather than comprised of clips and sound files that we can move and change.)


We are considering re-making our opening in animation form. This would be much easier to re-build quickly and it would be easy to include mise-en-scene, camera movements, etc. 


It would be very difficult to get our cast together again partly due to exams and partly due to time pressure, we would have to re-shoot our opening very soon, and that wouldn't be practical for most people. With stop-motion animation the lego men will always be available for us. 


Anyway, we can apply the storyboard and script work to the new animation opening, so we would only have to re-make the actual piece.  

Final Editing

Unfortunately the external hard-drive we were keeping our film opening on broke. So we have the 2nd edit version, however it's already been "produced" meaning we saved it as a mov. file using Powerdirector8. This means it is no longer comprised of clips and files, but is one file itself. So that was insanely inconvenient. 


We've scheduled another editing session for Wednsday 15th February to try to work around the tech. failures, but if we can't we will arrange another filming session for another day during half-term. Then we can do another series of edits in quick succession, using a whole day at my house. (Saving the opening on a memory stick as well as the internal hard-drive of my computer. This way Clara can have a copy too.)