…is what several people have asked in response to the Star Wars Lego film we put together a few weeks back. Briefly describing the process, the actual filming of the Lego was done at my desk, using stop motion. A camera on a tripod took a photo of the Lego scene, then I moved all the characters took another photo and so on. In all there was about 110 images. With the help of Ben from Toddifilms these pictures were strung together using Adobe film making software that trimmed the images and timed them to four frames per second to make it look like they were moving. The opening cut scenes, the ‘a long time ago…’ the opening scroll and end credits were all made on photoshop and imported into the same software. The sound effects are mp3 files found on the net, as is the music.

You can have many layers of sound, each sound file is triggered to begin when a particualr image frame appears on screen. The voices were recorded on a microphone and then turned into a digitised sound file and like the rest of the sound slotted into the film when appropriate. The Lego sabers were replaced with ‘rotoscoped’ sabers again using photoshop. After all the changes the entire series of files is rendered together (which takes a home PC about 6 hours to do!)  and then uploaded onto Youtube! Fortunately Lucasfilm is actually supportive of fan films that promote Star Wars, so as long as we aren’t making profit from it, we have no breach issues.