Back in 1999, my brother and I put together a Lego stop motion movie.
Ohio Dan and the Silver Brick of Doom. I had to laugh at the
beginning of The Lego Movie since the beginning scene and a couple of the
lines reminded me of Ohio Dan.
The pictures were taken with a Sony Mavica floppy disk camera at a
whopping 640×480 resolution, with us pretty much making up the story as we went
along. I can’t remember what software we used though. The credits said
Made with Macintosh, so in 1999 that would be the Avid movie software
that Apple was bundling with Macs at the time (iMovie wasn’t until
October of that year). I had just learned that there are pickles called
sweet gherkins, which I thought was hilarious, so that had to be the
name of the villain. Our protagonist was a parody of Indiana Jones.
The resultant movie still makes me chuckle. 🙂
Stopmotion is such a neat storytelling format, and it’s relatively easy
to do. Especially with all the software and digital cameras that are
available now. In ’99 we had to juggle floppy disks. Sometimes the disk
would go bad and we would have to redo the shots. There was no frame of
reference on what the previous shot was (no onion skinning) so you just
kind of guessed. An old iPhone or iPod touch is enough to get started.
Maybe someday we’ll complete the story.