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. Β 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.
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.
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.
I get a chuckle out of this EVERY time I watch it. Really. Thank you!
Glad you like it. Thanks.
Well, am this face right now >>> :-O as I always throught you had managed to capture two live ones from Legoland, all be it sweary ones with welsh accents. I truly know nothing.
Shhhhh……… If the truth gets out, the Lego rights activists will be down on me like a ton of bricks.
I’m printing (badly spelt) T-shirts as I type, ‘Free the Lego too’ π
Brilliant. I await your appearamce atop one of our more high profile public buildings.