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There are some great resources available online. But experimentation is the name of the game here. I’ve used regular old LED lights with gooseneck lamps in the past to do desktop photography, with great results. It also means you have to use lights in a specific way to get consistent results.
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Thick drapes over the windows are a good start.
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What this means is, first of all, is that you need to have a way to block out natural light. If the light is fluctuating in every shot you take, you’ll see strobes and weird flickering when playing the video back. Any changes in the lighting level must be deliberate. One of the most important things in stop motion is precise control of the lighting in your scene. If you move the camera before finishing the scene, you may end up with unwanted motion that could be unusable. However, to start with I recommend just making single-frame scenes without camera movement. Panning shots, tracking, or zooming are a few possible effects. Now, this is not always true – there are many instances where we want to move the camera as part of the stop motion project. It’s very important that the frame you are photographing does not change, since this will affect the final product. In other words, you need a tripod mount or some other solid mounting system. It is, however, important that you have a way to mount the camera in a specific position from which it will not change. You can use a normal digital camera or even your phone to get started. Stop motion requires a bit of photography savvy in order to get the really good results, but if you don’t know much about photography, don’t stress too much. In principle, any camera will do, but you’ll get the best results with a DSLR – it lets you manually focus and has better optics than other types of camera. A spare room, basement, or study are all good candidates. Why? Because any project such as this is likely to run over multiple days, which means you need to have the luxury of leaving your stuff in place and coming back to it later to add more footage. While you can make simple stop motion videos just about anywhere, it makes a huge different to have a permanent or semi-permanent space in which you can make your movies. So let’s go over the basic tools that you need. In fact, under my list of the five best LEGO instructional books you’ll find one complete guide to the art of LEGO film making. There are some really great resources out there if you really want to take it to the next level. It’s about outlining how it works and what you need to get started. This article is not about turning you into a stop motion LEGO expert goodness knows I’m not and I wouldn’t actually publish the stop motion work I’ve done for fun.
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This is largely irrelevant to LEGO fans who want to make films at home if you think it’s tricky to make stop motion at home, wait until you try your hand at computer-generation! There is, however, a place for that technology in these movies too, since you’ll often want to add simple digital effects such as explosions to your home LEGO movie. It’s just that the technology is now at the point where it can render LEGO in a photorealistic way. The LEGO movies we see on the big screen today are for the most part computer-generated. The big Hollywood LEGO movies have certainly helped to lift the profile of these fan films but, ironically, they use very little stop motion. Some people even make a living from publishing these videos online and raking in the ad money or donations from fans through platforms such as Patreon. Entire sites are dedicated to the community and culture of LEGO stop motion. There’s a whole sub-genre of LEGO stop motion films on the internet. You don’t have to be an expert modeler or artist to make use of them, and you also learn a lot about film while you’re at it. LEGO provides the perfect start to building scenes and characters. This is, of course, labor-intensive getting just a few seconds of footage can take hours and hours of careful work, but the art of stop motion has a lot going for it, especially from a LEGO fan’s point of view. After each photo is taken, the objects in the scene (including the characters) are moved just a little bit and then the next frame is snapped. It’s the same method used in classic films such as King Kong.īasically, physical models are built to represent the characters and scenery of the film and then a still camera is used to photograph each frame of the action. The way they have been doing this is by using a film technique known as “stop motion”. The truth is that fans of LEGO have been making their own home movies with LEGO for ages.
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We’ve had the LEGO Movie turn into a smash hit internationally, and LEGO Batman also did incredibly well. These days most people are used to the idea of a movie made entirely with LEGO.
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