Project 2: Final

For Project 2 I made a movie using Lego men as the characters. The story is based off one that I’ve had in my head for a while. To create the movie I used pictures, music, and sound effects. At first I planned to animate the pictures, but decided against it because of the time it would take too long.

The first part of the project was the story. I decided to not start at the beginning, but rather at a point where there was information the watcher may have missed. I did this as a homage to web serials, which I watch frequently. I also felt that the movie would have been too long to include all the information. I also decided to use methods from silent movies to portray dialogue, by having the dialogue show on a separate shot, of course I needed to add the person who spoke since the mouths don’t move.

Next came the pictures. I decided to use Legos partially for the humor, partially as a challenge, but mainly because I could do a project I couldn’t do with regular people. All of the pictures I took were at Cooper’s Rock State Forest. I tried to make them look as realistic as possible, but on a few occasions I needed to use other Lego pieces (such as the track to the cell or the cell itself) and fishing wire, which was quite obvious. I did minor edits using Photoshop. This was mostly to darken the pictures, but I did extensive edits on four of the pictures. Two of these were the energy bolt pictures, which was simply coloring with a low opacity. Another of these was the picture of Guthbert “branding” Ulric. I added the flame, colored the majority of it black, and making the brand glow. Then last was the appearance pictures in which I had a middle picture between the one with characters and the one without. I just overlaid the one picture and changes the opacity.

This lead to the next step, making the movie. Using movie maker, I added the pictures and captions. I changed the timing on pretty much everything. The slowest pictures are about four and a half seconds long (the horse riding scenes) and the fastest are a second long (the fight scenes). The captions are generally longer than the pictures allowing the viewer to read them.

The last thing I did was add the music and sounds. The two songs I used were the opening of “The Islander” and the end of “The Poet and the Pendulum” from Nightwish’s album Dark Passion Play. The sounds from the talking and torture scenes is the ticking of a clock slowed down, reversed, and pitched down. The breathing was a recording of a person breathing pitched down. Finally there was the sword sounds. These were actual sounds of two swords hitting which were then mixed together to sound like a sword fight. Also for the block sword sound, I repeated the same sound file and progressively quieted it. I also tried to add hoof beats, walking sounds, and environment sounds, but these didn’t seem to work. I also couldn’t find any noise fitting the mood of the final scenes, so I left it silent.