Star Wars Brickfilms/Rant on the LSWMM Contest

Just in case you're wondering, a brickfilm is, in a nutshell, a LEGO movie. There are almost 4,000 published on brickfilms.com, and a big chunk of that are Star Wars brickfilms, some of which popped out when TLC hosted the "butchered" Lego Star Wars Movie Making Contest. You know what I'm talking about. If you've seen the entries An Exiguous Eschewal or Clone Trooper Down, you would have believed they should have won in the 13-17 category. But, of course, you find out that the 6 feet under less-than perfect An Average Death Star Day won in that category, for its blurryness and horrible voice-acting, and I just about committed suicide. I mean, the first two entries mentioned above didn't even get submitted under "Honourable Mentions". And then, we at Brickfilms.com took action. Some of us started writing letters. And the replies we got. Some told us that all entries submitted were watched, others said not all entries were watched. And here's the thing: this entire contest spawned a 37-page thread.

My rant ends here.

Now, to continue. I scoured the brickfilms.com directory for all excellent or awesome brickfilms the good people here would enjoy. And here you go:

An Exiguous Eschewal by Nick Durron

Clone Trooper Down by Philip "Smeagol" Heinrich

Triumph of the Empire by Brendan "Ladon" Henry

Attack of the Drones by Philip "Smeagol" Heinrich

The Great Disturbance by Leftfielder Studios

The Lego Star Wars Project by "Banban"

A Wasted Journey by Chris "Buxton" Salt

Episode III: Rise of the Empire (Trailer) by Jay Silver

Dark Apprentice by Nick Durron

Bane of the Sith by Philip "Smeagol" Heinrich

These are only a few, more to come. Enjoy.

My brother and I both entered movies into the contest too, mine being "Cloud City Interlude" and his being "Mustafaar Duel" athough these movies weren't perfect we thought they were pretty good, certainly better than some that did make it in. Ours however didn't even score a honorable mention, I would give you guys a link to my Brickshelf movie page so you guys could judge them for yourself, but my movie page is currently "Not open to the public" meaning the movies havn't been approved by a moderator yet in the six months since I posted them on Brickshelf.

These sound pretty cool, maggosh. Are there any pointers you can give us on how you make such cool videos?

Clonecommando007 wrote:These sound pretty cool, maggosh. Are there any pointers you can give us on how you make such cool videos?

Well, here are a few pointers:

1. Have an original idea. This is the basis of any award winning brickfilm. Have an idea for a film which stands out from the rest, don't try to imitate someone else's work.

2. Get Started! You can't make a fantastic brickfilm overnight. Start practising your animation techniques with small tests, aka walk cycles, blaster/lightsaber f/x.

3. Gather your resources. If you're to make a Clone Wars brickfilm, you're gonna need big sets. And for those sets that you can't build, you might want to go with green screening and CGI. If you need help with this, you might want to ask Smeagol or Nick Durron on Brickfilms.com.

4. Enjoy others. Just for inspiration, watch some of the brickfilms mentioned above. You may get the climax or inside joke you needed!