I saw a video about building a LEGO sand castle on the Small Brick City youtube channel. By the way this is a great channel that has loads of great videos about building MOCs and small buildings. Lots of great techniques are show to add great details to your builds.
Inspired by this I had the idea of having a kid build a sand castle. I gathered up all the sand colour pieces I could find and built a similar castle to the one I saw on Small Brick City’s channel. As well at this I build a beach scene with some water and a blue sky background.
The original idea was for the kid to dig some sand put it in a bucket and then create the sand castle bit by bit.
I had a few different attempts at doing this video. The first idea was to have the kid build the sandcastle by digging up the sand with a shovel and then have the dad walk over and fall in the hole. I started with just filling the bucket once and creating a tiny castle as a test. It didn’t look great though because there wasn’t really a hole where the kid dug up the sand. I would need to start by building up a layer or two of sand on the base plate to be able to remove some of it when the kid dug the hole. It was also tricky to get the minifig to use the shovel in a realistic way.
In the next attempt I used the layered sand technique a bit. I laid down some small 1x1 and 1x2 plates so they could be removed. I abandoned the shovel for this one and had the kid use the bucket directly to dig the sand. I was going to have the kid fill the bucket,walk over a bit and turn the bucket upside down and slowly build the castle bit by bit. After doing this twice I discovered how much a pain it was to do. The handle on the bucket kept falling off as I turned it in the minifigs hand to fill it up and turned it again to empty it. It just wasn’t working the way I wanted it to.
From this point on I decided to try doing a faster version of building the castle. Basically having the kid jump around as pieces were added to the castle. This didn’t look too bad so I went with it. Adding the popping sound as the minifig jumped around helped a lot. Without the sound it just looks weird.
A mistake I made at the start when setting up the shot was not leaving enough room for the castle. You can see that the castle gets made off to the left of the screen and there isn’t enough room to see all of it. After the castle was finished I ended up having to zoom out to be able to show it all. If you look in the background you can tell this wasn’t planned because you can see the blue sky cuts off on the right and there is a blue plate just lying on the ground in the background on the left hand side.
Still going with the idea of having the dad fall into the hole I began by having the kid call the dad over. As the dad started walking over though I decided it still wouldn’t look great having him fall in a hole since there wasn’t really a hole. As he was walking over he had to cross over a 1x1 tile piece on the base plate. I was trying to figure out how to make him stand on this flat piece and this gave me the idea of having him trip and fall and smashing the castle instead. This worked well and my kids found it funny when they saw it. My son and I recorded the voices and it was done.
The video didn’t end up like how I had originally planned but I was happy with the end result.
Details:
- Shot with Stop Motion Studio
- iPhone camera
- 165 Frames
- 15 fps
Things to improve on:
- A bit more planning would have helped to avoid needing to zoom out after the castle was built.
- Avoid trying to be too detailed with small objects like the bucket. This was a big annoyance as the handle kept popping off and getting it back to the same position was impossible.