I haven’t done much stop motion with moving vehicles so I had an idea of doing a race with 2 small LEGO ATVs. As well as just racing I thought it would be a good idea to have the minifigures build their vehicles before being able to race. I built a basic set a sand baseplate that would eventually be the starting point of the race that you see in the video.
I played around with a few different techniques during the shooting of this video. Not all of them made it into the final version. This was the first video where I did a lot of test shots to see how things might look in the final version. I tried overhead shots, moving camera shots and different movement speeds for the ATVs. Even at the end I still wasn’t overly happy with the ATV movements. There was some jerky movements in places. So there is definitely some room for improvement there.
To have the race last more than a few seconds the minifigs would need to travel a good distance. Unfortunately I only have 2 sand base plates so it was a bit of a challenge to show the ATVs driving for more than the length of the 2 base plates at a time. You will notice in the video that each clip of them moving is fairly short and that is because there was only room to move them so far before I had to take up the base plates and change around the scenery and then continue the race. The background I used is also not very big which also limited the size of the scenes.
This was the first brickfilm I have made that had multiple scenes rather than just one continuous shot from the same position, although I helped my son has made a few videos with multiple shots such as Somebody is hurt!. So this was a good learning experience since it meant I had to plan out some of the shots before doing them.
The building scene was interesting too but didn’t quiet turn out how I had originally planned. I was going to have them fully build the ATVs piece by piece since they contain a small number of parts. But time, or more specifically lack of time, became an issue and I had to settle for having the minifigs jump around in a more timelapse fashion while building them. I did do a few test runs of the building to see what it would look like so that helped form the final version.
I ended up shooting this video over the course of a few days. With where I shoot it I can’t leave the lights setup all the time. So it means there was a difference in lighting between some of the shots. Within the individual shots it is pretty consistent so it is not too bad overall.
One scene I had trouble with was the small crash at around 34 seconds. It didn’t come out as I had originally pictured it. I didn’t use enough frames to capture it so it’s honestly not too noticeable in the video. Although really the only reason I tried to add it was because I needed a reason or a way for the yellow rider to pass the red rider since I had already filmed the yellow rider winning the race. I also had some trouble finding a good sound effect to help enhance that bit of the scene. A better sound effect might have helped it be more noticeable.
Overall it was fun to make and it was the most detailed video so far.
Details:
- Shot with Stop Motion Studio
- iPhone camera
- 403 Frames
- 15 fps
Things to improve on:
- Use more frames rather than less when unsure since it is easy to cut out frames later but harder to go back and reshoot scenes.
- Use smaller movements for vehicles to avoid any jerky movements in the end result.
- Plan out how much space will be needed when moving vehicles since it requires a lot more space than moving minifigs does.