LEGO STAR WARS BRICKFILM
2012-2015
On the way to rob a bank. Ignore the dynamite.
A particularly rough kind of town.
Crime lurks within an ordinary-seeming apartment building.
Tools of the trade.
I wouldn't want to live here. Would you?
Can't get into the vault? Just shoot the control panel and it's guaranteed to open.
They should have known better than to take priceless valuables on mass transit.
Let a guy have his vice once in a while.
After finishing my previous animation project, I wanted to try something dramatically more complex. My brothers and I loved playing with Legos since the earliest days we could remember, and unsurprisingly, we were particularly captivated by Lego Star Wars...even though none of us watched the actual movies until much later in our lives.
So we made up our own story, imagining Darth Vader as the boss of a ragtag gang of mobsters in a Wild West sort of town. Luke Skywalker encounters the group on a perfectly ordinary business trip, finding himself the only one capable of tracking them down and bringing them to justice.
My brother and I started production in August 2012, assembling sets one at a time on the kitchen countertop and shooting stop-motion footage with minifigs and vehicles. We did the best we could with the resources we had, but in hindsight it was barely enough. My inexpensive point-and-shoot digital camera had no auto-focus or auto-exposure lock, nor the ability to remotely trigger the shutter. The self-timer feature helped a lot, but I still had to touch the camera every single frame. A tripod helped with stability, and we developed some other tricks like securing the camera to a platform or sled using sticky office putty, but those couldn't help the limitations of the camera itself. Small wonder most stop-motion is filmed using DSLRs with full manual control.
The gang's hideout, a studio apartment converted into a hive of scum and villainry.
Our cast of miscreants.
The apartment lobby, whose management is somehow unaware of its tenants' activities.
The streets of the city. Yes, someone really did build a bank right next to the jail.
Pretty sure this dark corridor was the most complicated lighting setup in the entire production.
Luke Skywalker's bungalow, built far away from any sign of civilization.
All of the buildings had removable ceilings and walls for interior shots.
Figuring out how to assemble tunnels for a rail heist scene.
The completed rail site, with a bedsheet used to portray the distant sand dunes.
Portraying large open areas wasn't easy. The amount of floor space we needed tried my poor mother's patience.
"Don't stop, it's a trap!".....CRUNCH. We imagined the Mon Calamari as a group of infamously bad drivers.
The hideout finally located, Luke Skywalker plans his dramatic entry.
We used bits of paper to portray broken glass. In hindsight, we probably should have sliced up a Ziploc bag instead.
The gang members captured, Luke's nemesis reappears.
A lightsaber duel spanning two rooftops.
In the climactic moment, Luke catches Vader off guard and uses the Force to push him off the roof.
Months turned into years as we continued collecting footage to fill out our script. As the intensity of the work slowly built toward the story's climax, so did my ambitions for the kind of post-production work that would be needed to complete the project. Background/sky replacement, rotoscoped lightsabers and blaster bolts, and even layering together multiple shots to create giant cityscapes that we had neither the space nor the bricks to build and shoot all at once. I was a dumb teenager and didn't yet understand the danger of scope creep. My brother tried to dissuade me from making such elaborate plans. He was right.
It didn't help that I insisted on doing all of this work using the custom image editing software I was also trying to build. Even though it never worked well, by this point in time it was at least usable enough, and if the opportunity existed, I still think I could have eventually finished the project as originally planned.
Background replacement VFX for the sky and sun in the desert.
Unsuccessful experiment to stack multiple components of a huge scene together.
Rotoscoped lightsaber glow effect.
Sky replacement and day-to-night vignette.
Attempt at set extension, painting in the walls between two rooftops. Notice how I failed to handle the perspective correctly.
One of the original sound effects recorded during production.
Having abandoned my custom software, I used Affinity Designer to produce this overlay for a scene in the final edit.
Re-timing and editing footage together using DaVinci Resolve.
Unfortunately, time ran out. My whole family moved across the country shortly after I graduated high school, and with starting college and a part-time job, I no longer had the free time (or, frankly, the energy) for giant hobby projects. We did manage to finish shooting all the scenes in the script, and I had started figuring out my workflow for the post-production VFX, but there was no chance of seeing all of that through to completion....
But that wasn't the end of the story after all. In late 2025, I discovered that I still had good copies of ALL of the material we had produced ten years prior, in exactly the same unfinished state we had left it. It was no longer worth my time to try to finish all the VFX, but I could at least assemble the stop-motion video and edit those clips together into something watchable enough to finally share with my family after all this time. The final product came in at just under ten minutes of runtime. Unfortunately, between our embarrassing pre-pubescent voice acting and potential copyright issues from the sound effects and music we had ripped straight from one of the games, the finished product isn't something I can release publicly.