My first "long" film, and hopefully not my last! Made over the course of two months, Frankenstein was a "villain" film made for the Heroes and Villains contest at Brickfilms.com, and was voted 1st out of 19 movies.

Making this movie was very time-consuming, tiring and often boring. At times I spent literally an hour or more just lighting a shot, only to have a delicate setup shift half way into animating it. I had a lamp fail on me during the mortuary scene that caused some flickering, and to top it all off, my iMac completely bit it only a few weeks before the deadline. I animated the rain scene on an old G3 that was so slow I couldn't preview the footage without converting it to quarter size first.

I tried to be ambitous audibly, as well as visually. It was my first movie with dialogue (I had done tests), and I wrote over 4 and 1/2 minutes of music for the movie in the few days I had to edit everything. I even recorded a peanutbutter jar hitting cement from 8 feet in the air. I think some of the glass may still be out there.

One of the most exciting things about making this movie was getting very strong reactions from a lot of different people of different ages. I was blown away by some of the positive and very kind reviews. (read some here) Because of the "villainous" subject material, however, there were also negative reactions, especially at the live showing. Josh described what happened:

". . . There were audible gasps during the knife part. As the film progressed, children became visibly upset, as did their parents . . ."

I'm sad that some people didn't enjoy my film, but at the same time I'm very happy that my Lego animation was actually "scary," since it was supposed to be.

Overall, this has only helped to strengthen my addiction to film making, stop motion animation, and animation in general.

Production Stills

A shot of the laboratory. I wanted this set to be impressive, as well as accessible. I wish it was more claustrophobic, but it would have made animation much more difficult, and I sort of like that little glowy thing in the middle. Like a high-tech furnace.

This shows the furnace lit up. I animated the flashlight moving back and forth to get the pulsing look.

I really like how this shot turned out. You can see here how different it looks without the FCE filters. The lamp positioning is what sells the effect.

Another shot of the lamp at its low profile. For the actual sunset I did a live-action shot of me slowly lowering the lamp.

On the left you can see my graveyard set, and on the right are some of the bricks I used to make the mortuary scene. I don't like the mortuary scene as much as I thought I was going to. The location is too much like the doctor's lab. Hopefully the (mostly) unintentionally weird lighting makes up for it.

This is the table directly across from my two desks that I hijacked for the production of Frankenstein.

G5 glistening in the corner, and most of two solid wooden desks to animate on, with room for lights and backdrops. Now if I could somehow remove the doors and windows . . .

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