Final Piece

The final piece also includes Live Action sections that are not 100% relevant to this module, they were mainly ideas for Final Major and exploring how a narrated stop motion piece would be created. For the pure stop motion parts of the shorts these are the timings 2:00 - 2:30 & 3:00 - 3:10.

Copyright

"The LEGO Trademarks may be used under certain Limited Circumstances on an Unofficial Web Site
The LEGO trademarks (but not the logo) may be used in a non-commercial manner to refer to LEGO products or elements which are shown or discussed on a web site, as long as the trademark is not unduly emphasized or used in a way that can lead an observer to mistakenly believe that the site is sponsored or authorized by the LEGO Group."

https://www.lego.com/en-gb/legal/legal-notice/fair-play

When looking at using LEGO I thought it would be a good idea to check the copyright laws for the use of LEGO and how it can be viewed on the internet, as I am not creating a commercial piece and I am not anywhere using the LEGO logo, I have taken from this part of the LEGO website that I can produce my project. 

Editing

These are stills from my editing of my stop motion footage.

One of the things I had to do during the edit was add more saturation to the footage as the camera had for some reason barely taken in any colour at all, I am unaware if this was my fault or is just the way the camera films but it was easily fixed with the Quick Colour Tool

The rest of the edit was simple enough, just putting footage together and adjusting any brightness issues, then adding the sounds and music in the right place.

Sounds & Music

For my stop-motion shorts I have decided to add sound effects and music. All sound recording will be done in co-operation with Dan Bolton. I will be adding voice lines also as I feel this will give clarity to the very loose story that I have created. Without the voice lines it will be very confusing as to what is going on because the limited movement possibilities, however it is not possible to have mouth movements without editing in a moving mouth. I believe that the stop-motion will be better without these mouths however as they will be distracting.

My Tests

This is the video of the test footage I took when practicing techniques and movements with the lego characters. The tests were mainly arm movements and walking to see how easy it was to achieve the effect and see which time lapse setting to set the camera to when moving the characters around. I found that sometimes it was often beneficial to let the camera take two frames before moving the character to ensure the movement looked fluid rather than jumpy.
I also did a test in this of using a cloth dinosaur in the shot, as this is not lego it is harder to create the movement as when released the dinosaur would move back to its original position rather than holding it, I thought it would be an interesting challenge to include this in the final piece.

Editing

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To edit this footage I have chosen to use Premiere rather than Avid as I am not an experienced editor and find this software easier to use. All I need it for is to sew the footage together and maybe add some basic effects and transitions.

Learning the Basics

This video and many other Youtube tutorials all gave very helpful tips for people starting off in the world of LEGO stop motion. From moving arms to walking to even possibly jumping, there is a lot of things you can do with LEGO.