Lego Animation that isn't the Lego Movie

Stop animation is hard enough to do, but stop animation using legos is a whole new ballpark. This is what animated the music video for "Fell In Love With A Girl" by the White Stripes. Michel Gondry directed this video in 2002 and it would later win three MTV Video Music Awards for that year including Breakthrough Video, Best Special Effects, and Best Editing. The video was shot frame by frame and each frame had a completely rebuilt lego arrangement to simulate movement. This painstaking animation was something that hadn't been done before in a music video. The attention to detail and the planning that went into making this video is so easy to see. The lego blocks are brought to life and they create a great high-energy vibe to the music video.

LEGO Animations

The holidays got me to thinking about what my favorite toys were growing up, and LEGOs came to mind. Not surprisingly, I wasn't the only person on the Internet looking to see informationa bout LEGO animations and how some could be done.

I actually got redirected to a Video Copilot forum in which some people were discussing different ways in which you could animate LEGOs, and most people came to the conclusion that you could either do very limited animation work using something like After Effects, or just use stop motion to animate. I'll give examples of both that I found on the forum.

This first example is one in which a guy put together a pretty basic video using some LEGOs and a green sheet in which he keyed in random desert images and changed the position of the LEGOs to give the pretty basic illusion of movement.

The stop motion versions of LEGO use are obviously more tedious but much more rewarding. The best example I found was this music video by The White Stripes: