Stop me if you want to animate!

Like many young boys, and I daresay girls, Joshua is a bit of a Lego fiend. He just loves building a new model and incorporating it into a diorama - one that's normally populated by storm-troopers and attack helicopters it's true but nevertheless there's a story there somewhere. Anyway like most of us I've long been aware of some great Lego animations on YouTube; this classic sketch, Death Star Canteen, by Eddie Izzard has me laughing out loud everytime. Joshua though has only recently become aware of the possibilities and now he spends most of his time searching the net for Lego films. Thankfully we have parental controls turned on!

The point of this post though is that recently Lenore took Joshua to a film-making workshop for kids held at the Rich Mix arts centre in East London and he absolutely loved it. Here they got to learn about animation techniques and bringing a story to life with the end result being a film of their very own: Tree Redux I call it!



Now, of course, he fancies taking this interest further and it turns out there's a whole world of brick-based stop-motion out there known as brickfilming or bricksinmotion. So it looks like I'll be splashing out on a Logitech Webcam 9000 in the near future since that comes highly recommended on these geeky creative sites. Beyond the hardware I'll need some software and I reckon that Zu3D looks like a decent package for kids and since a film without sound is pretty half-hearted I'll probably need a sound editor up to the standard of Audacity.

Maybe pursuing these imaginative urges is going to prove time-consuming, not to say expensive in Lego, but I don't mind admitting that I quite fancy scratching this itch myself! After all the all-powerful Lego corporation is right behind this brick-based madness and I can't play Lego Universe all of the time!