LegoVideoMania

The boys have been busily working on their Lego videos this weekend. Well, what else are you going to do on a wet, rainy weekend?

The videos aren't ready for Prime Time yet, but we might have some teaser/trailer clips ready in a week or so. I'm not rushing the boys to get anything done because we're still working on simple techniques of shooting and editing, and hoping that they're just having fun.

They have lots of fun, so long as the movies are silly. They love silly movies!

For Adam, it's Lord of the Rings-style movies, with castles and knights and wizards; with James, it's Star Wars or Spiderman movies, with lots of weird creatures doing battle with (or just plain eating) ordinary people. Adam always goes for the classic sword duel, whereas James likes the gross-out.

Actually, it surprised me how quickly they took to the medium. The "rushes" from today looked pretty good, considering how little instruction they were given. I gave them some basics on lighting and focusing, and they were doing anywhere between 50 and 150 frames per scene. We dumped the JPEGs into Microsoft MovieMaker for a quick view of the results, talked about some things that needed to change - like redoing some shots when the camera lost focus, or increasing the number of frames in a scene due to jerkiness - and they were both humming the music they wanted to put in as background.

If you've heard the Numa Numa song, you know which one they want. If you haven't heard it, don't go looking for it, because it will infest your brain and you won't be able to get it out of your head. I warned you!

The most difficult thing about making these movies is that the boys have to understand how much work really goes in to one of these productions. Even though there are digital cameras which can give us "instant" movies, and there is software to simpify all the special effects, it is by no means a simple task to take hundreds of pictures and combine them all together to form a composite feature, not when one takes into account that there may be specific timing intervals between the frames, or that each frame must be timed for a specific duration, or that there will need to be synchronization between the action and the audio.

The boys have been continually reminded - and asked - about creating scripts prior to shooting the movies, and they have been consistently ignoring that aspect of the process. Doubtless they will discover how important it is when they get around to inserting the audio track - because they will find out how crucial it is to know what the character is going to say, how long he is going to say it, how long the camera needs to focus on the face while he is saying it, and how the action has to sync up with the words being said.

But that is for another day. Or days. For now, we'll be happy just to make some silly scenes, get comfortable with the cameras, figure out how to light the subjects so that the auto-focus works right, and dream of one day getting a real video camera instead of these cheesy-but-expensive ones that are supposed to be used for making holiday shots, not making Lego movies.