A LEGO Brickumentary Page #7

With brick films, you're uninhibited.

If he needs a 12-mile highway

to shoot a car chase,

he builds the 12-mile highway.

Whatever he thinks of,

he builds it and he does it.

To get somebody to walk,

like, five feet,

you have to take 15 frames

every second of that walk.

So you have to move them in just

little millimeter increments.

It's incredibly tedious.

There's nothing else I've ever done

that takes this long.

But when you're working with minifigs,

you don't have to deal with

agents or egos, or anything

that befalls working

with regular actors.

They're great.

If I want to do a 16-hour day,

they don't complain.

No overtime.

Jonathan's creating

one of his sets for his movie.

They're doing the work in the garage.

He tells me he's making a movie.

I have to take that on faith.

He's playing with LEGOs,

something that he's done

since he was a toddler.

My family has been

pretty supportive about this.

He's very creative,

but I would really like to be able

to park my car in the garage, yes.

Well, there's been

a long tradition of brick films.

One of my favorite

brick film makers is David Pagano.

New York filmmaker David Pagano

has been making brick films

since he was nine.

David is considered

one of the top LEGO animators,

and is known for creating complex

characters out of bricks.

Most films you're going to see

will have minifigures as the main actor.

They're just articulated enough to be

moveable into a variety of fun poses,

but not so over-articulated

that you need help

getting them to stand up properly,

or look like a normal human being,

or as normal as someone

with no nose looks.

Hey!

I have done a lot of stuff

with minifigures,

both for LEGO and just for myself,

but I also am just endlessly fascinated

with what you can build from bricks.

I just find it an interesting challenge

as opposed to having a readymade actor.

I'd rather figure out ways

to make neat-looking characters,

and then make sure they're animate-able,

then bring them to life.

I am somewhat of a LEGO archivist.

On my better days I consider myself

a LEGO animation historian,

if such a job exists.

I don't think it does,

but I'll pretend to myself,

until someone tells me to stop.

So, the very first LEGO films

were promotional videos

or commercials that were made

in the '60s and '70s.

I think it should have a big middle part

and two little sides that stick out.

But the first fan film didn't come

until the mid-to-late 1980s,

and that was a film

called The Magic Portal.

They used sloped pieces

in a really interesting way

where you could get these

weird little blobby creatures

that crawl along the set.

There's some nice animation

with some of

the old LEGO backhoe pieces.

In the early 2000s, LEGO films

really started to take off.

Everyone had the Internet,

and it was starting to become

this thing that was

not going away, it wasn't a fad.

And it was in everybody's home

as a way to connect with other people.

That's sort of when I would say

"the modern era"

of LEGO animation started.

The LEGO animation content that you

can find online just runs the gamut.

There's cool stuff, there's weird stuff.

There's some stuff

that's really well put together

and just shot gorgeously

and has really interesting parts usage.

There's immensely inappropriate stuff.

You can get all kinds.

One thing that's become pretty common

is shot-for-shot remakes of scenes

from famous films or film trailers.

So they'll build each set

that you see in each shot...

Describe what

Marsellus Wallace looks like!

- What?

- Say what again!

I've seen The Dark Knight.

If you devote yourself to an ideal,

then you become something else entirely.

Ed Sheeran has a music video

that someone was commissioned

to make into LEGO.

I'm going to pick up the pieces

And build a LEGO house

Another thing that people

are recreating with LEGO

is just, like, news events.

Some people were

re-creating Olympic scenes,

and when Felix Baumgartner

did that jump from space,

there was, like, a LEGO version

of it, like, 24 hours later.

If you do a YouTube search for LEGO,

you're going to find

13 million hits at least.

I think it will only get more prevalent

and there will only be more

and more people doing it

because it's super fun.

Oh, my gosh! I love this song!

The LEGO Movie was

done with computer graphics,

but made to look like a brick film.

The director specifically said

they were inspired by

LEGO stop-motion web videos.

And it's cool that they were able

to include a few of those.

In the climax of The LEGO Movie,

you can see my film Garbage Man.

Whoa! Awesome!

It's technically not a brick film

because it's computer generated.

Ours is going to be fully stop motion,

so I'm trying to make

one that's the best quality

for a really long running time.

It will be the greatest

LEGO movie ever made.

Otherwise, I've failed.

In the film, there's this cop,

who all he ever

wanted to do was be a cop,

this little LEGO guy named Tony.

And he used to be a skateboarder,

so he can chase criminals

down on his skateboard.

And then this guy Duman,

this great classic super villain,

comes into town

and just starts burning everything down.

Right now, you're afraid...

of melting.

In a few seconds, you'll feel the burn

in your little, plastic eyeballs.

Was that the direction you want to go?

- Yeah. I'm digging that.

- Wow.

When I was originally

working on the film,

I wasn't planning to raise any money.

But then Matt looked at the script.

I was like, how are you

going to do this?

Do you have enough bricks?

This is way bigger than anything

you've done that I've seen.

And he said, "Uh, well,

we'll have to fill in the city

probably with some CGI,

maybe get a little bit more bricks."

And I was like, "No.

You have to build a city.

This has to be the greatest

LEGO movie ever made, Jonathan."

And so I said, "Okay,

we have to do a Kickstarter."

Hi, I'm Jonathan Vaughan,

and I'm directing Melting Point,

which is a stop-motion animated film

made with LEGO bricks.

I'm Robert Fleet. I'm playing Duman.

I get to melt things a lot.

It's really fun.

Action.

So, guys, here's what I was

thinking up for the establishing shot.

We're going to need to build

basically everything you see here,

so pretty much the entire city.

We're going to have to use CGI then?

I will not use CGI, okay?

I want this to be

the best brick film ever made.

LEGO started as a toy,

but now it's definitely...

It's a way people are expressing

themselves in this weird hobby,

so it's definitely also a tool

and a means to an end,

a means to tell stories

and express yourself

in a gigantic variety of ways.

All around the world

people are pushing the limits

of what they can do

with the LEGO system,

and what it's capable of

as a building material.

Now I can officially say,

that with the height of 112 feet,

11 and three-quarters inches,

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