Although it has now been made popular by recently released special Lego sets which include a camera and editing software, Andy Boyer and I have been making animated LegoMation movies together since 1989, and my earliest work dates back to 1985.  Similar to ClayMation (but a little easier), LegoMation involves stop-frame type animation.

While this is sometimes much easier to do with a film camera, working with film can be prohibitively expensive.  And at the time, Andy had a video camera and I had an editing VCR.  The way we used to do it was to shoot all the animation in-camera, then audio-dub the voices and sound effects over the video using the camcorder.  We would then add music by using my older VCR which only dubbed audio onto one audio channel.  It was grueling work with consumer equipment, and it required you to estimate the time to say the characters' lines as you were animating.  Our first movies were fraught with choppy dialogue, long pauses, bad edits and enormous plot holes.

My old job at WEEK and now Bradley, however, has afforded us a few luxuries we did not have before in terms of equipment and capabilities.  First of all, we are now able to do the audio first before animating, the method by which most animated work is now done.  We have also been experimenting with animating the mouths of the people as they speak; this allows for much more expression and realism in the scenes.

Since we were just experimenting with different techniques, we first decided to use audio which was already finished for us, instead of writing a script and cutting it from scratch.  So far our "second generation" work includes several short scenes from movies and a Johnny Cash music video.  Our most recent pieces can be viewed on the Recent Work page, linked below.

In 2004 Andy and I were asked to give a presentation at the 15th Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference at the University of Illinois, Champaign.  This was a very interesting experience, not to mention a GREAT little kicker for my annual activity report at Bradley.  Andy provides a write-up of his experiences at the event.

Follow the links below to download the movies.  All the videos are now in the Windows Media format for easier viewing.  You can download them by right-clicking if you want. (Mac: option-click)  There are usually two versions of each file; one for a broadband connection and a smaller file for a dialup connection.  Any of the recent stuff which has a side-by-side version has our Lego version next to the real movie scene so that you can see how close we came to each shot.