Animation for the Lazy Writer

Those of you who have read this blog before might have seen my Lego Riot Police animations. If you are curious, this is how I make them.

The basics

I have three shots of the Lego riot police which I use. One is an establishing shot and the two others are shot/reverse shots featuring each speaker. These are stills which I took with the Lego men on a white background. I then used Photoshop to put them on a real street.  Once I had those I needed to do the mouth movements. This I did in Photoshop by just drawing in mouth movements onto the original composite stills.

Establishing shot

Helmet guy

Yellow man

 

 

 

 

I have about twenty or so of these including ooo, ah, ee, frown and the accompanying eyebrow and blink movements. If I had known how much work it would be, I would have had them both wearing helmets. These are the basic tools which I now use every time.

Ah

Eee

Blink

Angry

Confused

Here’s how the process works.

Write the script, record the script, lay down the soundtrack in Adobe Premier, then just match up the images. I try to match up the images so the timing emphasises the comedy of the situation but that’s the hard part so I’m still learning. Sometimes a well timed blink is better than any line of dialogue. South Park is the gold standard for this sort of thing. I also lay down a few layers of background noise so it sounds like they’re on the mean streets of the UK.

Once I have done the edit and I am happy with it, I try to put it through Adobe After Effects to give it a hand-held camera quality. I haven’t quite got the hang of this though and I can’t get it to do it in high definition, so I have left it off most of them. I will persevere though.

Here’s my latest.