More custom Lego figures

Check out this fantastic lego website where they have customized and sell various figures from rock & pop and film & Tv.

http://www.little-legends.com/

I also came across a lot of zombie lego figures including a whole diarama of zombie hoards attacking a Lego city. Fantastic!

And here’s a short lego film with a zombie infection sweeping through Lego Town

New Lego figures

Finding the right characters for your Lego movie can be a bit of a task. It’s easy to make a Lego Star Wars, Harry Potter or Indiana Jones short because fortunately Lego make sets for all of those franchises. It becomes harder if you choose to make a film for which there are no Lego characters already designed. Lego themselves do a wide variety of different figures having just brought out a range called Minifigures (which includes a zombie).

If you can’t find what you’re looking for swapping character parts around may yield some reasonable results but some people have taken it one step further by giving the figures a complete overhaul. Take a look at the Ozzy Osbourne figure below.

if you’re interested in seeing more customised figures check out the following site: http://www.customminifig.co.uk where I also found this example of a Cylon…

More minifigures tomorrow.

Lego Film Remakes

Here are some great examples at the wonder of lego used to remake films or film scenes.

First up we have the who;le star wars saga remade in Lego and lasting just over 2 minutes. It looks rather professional so this might have been made by Lego themselves.

Lego Golf Thewlis

Hi there! Golf Thewlis here to talk about the benefits of using lego as an animation material! Not only am I going to talk about it but I’m going to be made from it as well. Take a look at the GIF underneath.

There are many great things about lego, one of them being that all the little fellows are jointed and easy to animate with. Added to that the figures stay where you put them thanks to little lego studs. Another great thing is you can build sets easily and then rebuild them as something else. Tomorrow I’m going to look at some of the short films that are being made with lego.

Blunt Goes lego crazy

Over the next few days we are going lego crazy as Golf Thewlis looks at the wonders of using Lego as an animating medium.

Generating smut on a PS3.

Machinima (pronounced /məˈʃiːnɨmə/ or /məˈʃɪnɨmə/) is the use of real-time graphics rendering engines, mostly three-dimensional (3-D), to generate computer animation.

While hiding from the world cup, an unnamed operative here at Blunt Productions had a PS3 session with the  game Red Dead Redemption – wild west meets grand theft auto in case you didn’t know.

Anyway, having murdered his way across a swath of the old west, his avatar found himself on a train which he tried to hold up but only succeeded in stranding in the middle of nowhere.

Then this happened:

How to make a funny film Part 2

As promised yesterday here are some practical guidelines in making a good comedy:

Just because everyone on the set thinks it’s funny, doesn’t mean an audience will like it.

Remember that feature films are made and watched under completely different circumstances. A film crew might be near the edge of hysteria after a long, stressful day, or bleary and hung over following an early call. A cinema audience might be relaxed, expectant, irritable, Swedish, any number of different states or mind and character. To put it simply, the production that thinks it is making the funniest film ever is in trouble. Nothing grates more than a film convinced of its own comic wonderfulness (are you listening, Richard Curtis?)

Extravagant productions are bad news for comedy.

The higher the budget, the more people who get involved, the more stress which is placed on the Director to make it work,  the more elaborate the set-up, the more black holes open up for the comedy to drain into. Why do people like Woody Allen, Armando Iannouchi and Hal Roach (producer of Laurel and Hardy) work with the same people so often in their projects, both in front of and behind the camera? Because a comfortable and tight unit where everyone knows each other keeps the production flowing. People are relaxed and everyone gets a clear image of what direction the work is going.

Comedy by committee doesn’t work.

There has to be one, maximum two people who are in charge of the film and who decide what stays in and what goes, which take to use and how the scene plays best edit-wise. Usually this is the Director, though often it can be the writer, producer or lead actor. The best comedies seem to be the ones where one person has assumed two or three of the above roles. If that person is any good at what they do then the chance of their vision coming to fruition is much greater thanks to their control (Christopher Guest, Woody Allen (again), Bruce Robinson, Mike Myers) – this can work the other way of course. If one person is in control and they do a crap job then the whole film suffers.

Don’t underestimate the post production

As timing is so important, a good editor who knows exactly when to cut can make a scene funny when it felt terrible during the filming. Likewise a bad editor can kill a joke stone dead. The difference between a funny scene succeeding or not can be tiny. Maybe a few frames either way. It’s not easy to describe on paper but ‘comic editing’ is an instinct that becomes honed by long hours of slogging away on an editing machine, trying to tell whether a joke works better one way or another when one has seen it for the 271st time. The same applies to music and sound effects. Badly chosen music will distract an audience from the scene without them even knowing why. Well placed and mixed sound effects can give a film a whole other dimension (see ‘Barton Fink’ for some of the best comic SFX ever made).

And finally: Remember that Goldman’s axiom (as explained in William Goldman’s ‘Adventures in the screen trade’) applies as much to comedies as to any other film: Nobody Knows Anything.  Don’t take anything I’ve written here as gospel because Nobody Knows Anything. There is no formula to making a good comedy, and what one may see as the funniest film ever made another will see as unfunny garbage. That said, if the people making British comedy films paid more attention to the four points above then just maybe there will be less garbage out there.

How to make a funny film Part 1

Making someone laugh is a bit like scratching their back. The specific location of an itch may be difficult for the scratcher to hit first time, and the scratchee usually can’t describe the exact place where it itches either. With a bit of direction along the lines of ‘up a bit, down a bit, left a bit. There. No, there!’ a good scratcher can find the place and exert the right amount of pressure to hit the spot.

However, continue to scratch the place and the scratchee’s pleasure will quickly turn to discomfort and repeated requests to stop before the skin starts bleeding. Sometimes the successful scratching of a portion of someone’s back will cause another place to start itching, and so on and so on. You may find it hard enough to follow someone’s directions to a series of specific points on their back but imagine how hard it is to anticipate every single location and map out a ‘scratching plan’ before they even get there.

OK, so what the hell has this to do with comedy? Just that the ‘scratching plan’ metaphor is the best I can come up with to describe how hard it is to make a consistently funny film. It’s one thing to say something that will make a bunch of your mates laugh. You know your audience, you know what buttons to push and what parts of their backs are itchy. It’s harder to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and make them laugh- whether you are a stand up comedian, part of a team doing a sketch, or trying to break the ice before presenting a business seminar. At least if one vein of humour isn’t working you can tell by the absence of laughs that it’s time to try something different.

Imagine how hard it is then to make a huge number of strangers laugh who aren’t even there when you’re making the joke, and do it many more times over at least 90 minutes. Not only that, but your joke may pass through several people’s hands, each changing it a little bit, before it reaches its finished form. In back scratching terms, you must design a back scratching machine with one hundred and fifty fingers, each adjustable to different strengths and which must be programmed to deliver a satisfying and non-lethal scratching regimen to the majority of people who submit to its mercy.

The problem with the British comedy film industry is that, like the British computer industry and the British mass produced car industry, years of bad management and crappy product design have changed what was once a world leader into a national joke. A very dark, tragic joke. The tragedy of it all is that in the fields of British cars and computing there have been over the years a some extremely talented people.  Alex Issigonis, who designed the Mini. Tommy Flowers, who worked for the post office until WW2 when he singlehandedly designed the world’s first programmable computer. For every talented visionary there seems to be a story of management bolloxing it up. Despite its major role in cracking the Germans’ Enigma code Tommy Flowers’ computer and its plans were destroyed after the war and he went back to working for the GPO. Thus it was the Americans who became leaders in the post war computer boom.

Have we gone off track as far as comedy films are concerned? Maybe, but the British film industry isn’t just called an industry to sound grand. As a product, a good film that can make people laugh all the way through is a precision instrument. The writer (or writing team) must design the jokes, the funny situations, the characters that make the comic interplay happen. The Director must visualise the scene (with help from the writer) and with the help of producers, production managers, camera operators, cinematographers and a whole raft of other people, right down to the caterers, translate the funny situation into a real situation so it can be filmed.

Then comes an actor and fluffs the line, or decides to try a funny accent and ruins the effect, or maybe delivers a line that wasn’t supposed to be funny and makes it funnier than the rest of the scene. Then when it’s shot the editor might cut in such a way that the comic timing is destroyed, or if you’re lucky cuts away to a reaction shot that makes the whole scene much much funnier. So finally you have a ‘bit’ which works as well as anyone can make it, and the Producers cut it from the film because they showed it to a test audience and no one laughed.

Repeat the above process about 100 times and try to get it all into a film that lasts 90 minutes. Sounds easy? Well I’m not even going to go into all the ‘screw-up’ factors like the lead actor being too drunk to deliver his line, or the Producer’s current squeeze getting a part despite their incredible lack of talent, or the film coming out right after a similar film and failing, or the writers being made to re-write the script so many times that they get burned out, or half the crew getting food poisoning, or the Director insisting on 27 takes for each scene despite the actors losing their edge after take 3.

So are we unable to make comedy films as well as we used to? Should the British film industry stick to period drama and leave comedy to the TV people? The problem with wild generalisations is that there are too many exceptions cropping up all over. Look at recent comedies ‘Janice Beard 45 WPM’ and ‘Johnny English’.  Compare to ‘The Ladykillers’ and ‘Withnail and I’ and yes, the trend is towards the crappy. But consider ‘Carry on Emmanuelle’ and ‘Morons from Outer Space’ and it becomes apparent that rubbish comedies have always been with us.

So what can be learned from a bad comedy? Is there anything that can be done to avoid making any more bad comedies? The answer to both these questions unfortunately is ‘not much’. Because every film is the culmination of millions of variables- some controllable, some horribly random- the only answers seem to be clear in retrospect. It’s harder to answer the question ‘How do we make it funny?’ before starting work than ‘What the hell went wrong?’ after the film tanks.  The only thing to do is try to swing the odds in your favour as far as possible and leave the rest to luck.

Tomorrow we shall look at some pratical examples…

The Plank Cam

OK zero budget filmmakers it’s time to learn how to get fluid tracking shots over rough terrian, clearing cars and other obstacles and not have to pay the outrageous fees they charge for hiring steadicams, steadicam juniors, jimmy jibs, cherry picker cranes, dollys and track or all that other stuff that usually goes for £1000 a day minimum- and this method doesn’t even involve sleeping with a steadicam/jib/crane operator, most of whom have bad hair and wear 10 year old Pink Floyd T shirts (except for Jeff Mart who’s a proper gent). Anyway, here’s how to make Blunt’s non patented PLANK CAM.

1. Get a plank. For God’s sake, don’t pay for it. Free planks are everywhere. Get one out of a skip. The one we’re using here was abandoned in the alley outside my house, along with about 20 rotting plasterboards which we have yet to find a use for. Camden Council don’t seem too keen on picking them up either, the bastards. but I’m straying from the point.

2. Place your camera in the exact centre of the plank. If you can’t be bothered to measure it place a pencil under the plank and move the plank up and down until it rests on the pencil like a see-saw without either side dipping. Then measure it properly because the pencil thing never works.

3. Secure the camera with plenty of gaffer tape. (tip: don’t buy gaffer from a camera place. They charge something like £15 for a roll. Hardware shops do the same stuff for a fiver. Very handy stuff, gaffer tape. Good Zebbies are never without it) Mind you don’t tape over any buttons you might need later, or else cut holes in the tape to get to them.

4. Right, we’re ready to start shooting. Get one person to hold the plank at one end, one at the other, and roll camera! Your two plank-cam operators may need some time to get used to the arrangement, but you’ll soon see the results with some really smooth tracking shots. For maximum absorption of bumps, a kind of Groucho Marx style walk seems to work the best.

This is only the very basic plank cam. If you see yourself doing a lot of shots like this, you can upgrade your plank-cam to the high end model like the one below with just a little imagination and a lot of gaffer tape. The crucial item is the counterweight which cuts down on camera wobble. If you really want to go for it, put the counterweight on a swivel joint so it remains pointing downwards when you tilt the plank.

Ok, we will admit right here that the end results probably wont beat dolly, track, steadicam, jib and all the expensive stuff which needs highly trained people with bad hair and Pink Floyd T shirts, but remember that the average popcorn muncher can’t even tell the difference between film and video, let alone appreciate a technically proficient shot. The plank cam will give you a perfectly acceptable shot and while Stanley Kubrick would probably leave it on the cutting room floor, bear in mind that he’s dead and we’re all still alive so who’s laughing now, eh?

Blunt Vault: Zero Budget Reality TV

It’s shockingly easy to make reality TV, and here’s what the networks don’t want you to know… it’s shockingly cheap too. All you need is this guide to ‘spicing it up’ a bit…