15th Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, October 2, 2004
By Andy Boyer
Dave Lennie and I
were invited to the 15th annual Society
for Animation Studies Conference held at the University of Illinois,
Champaign-Urbana on Oct. 2, 2004, to discuss brickfilms and present some
of our work. We were scheduled
from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM, after the society's annual meeting and right
before some presentation about Korean animation during the 1980's and
90's. We arrived around 2:00
and were greeted by Dr.
Karin Wehn, the professor from the University of Leipzig who was
giving the presentation on brickfilms and had invited us to the
conference. Karin told us
everyone was looking forward to the brickfilms' event, as much of the rest
of the conference (which had been going on since Thursday) consisted of
heavier fare, and the lectures could sometimes be boring.
Little did we know that our event would be surprisingly heavy,
although definitely not boring.
Karin began her talk
with an introduction to Lego bricks. She
had a small bag of them and passed around a mini-fig, explaining that this
was the primary type of actor in brickfilms.
She showed pictures of Lego creations she found on the internet,
ranging from massive town sets to the Brick
Testament. She then
described what a brickfilm was. I
thought this would be obvious, but a woman from the audience commented
that she thought film makers were modeling and animating everything with a
computer (along the lines of the Rocketmen vs Robots series) and was
surprised to learn we were actually using real bricks and manipulating
them frame by frame. This lead
to a discussion about why we would animate that way, when computer
animation would be much easier. Dave
and I pointed out that when we started making brickfilms in the 1980's,
computers were not capable of animating in that manner.
Other audience members began tossing around their high-brow opinions
about the "tactile appeal" of using real bricks, or the
“nostalgic quality” of playing with the toys.
We informed the audience that we used Lego bricks because that is
what Dave had lying around. I
think they preferred their own explanation.
Next, Karin brought
up brickfilms.com
on the big screen, and mentioned how many films were currently on there (I
think she said over 500.) She
said there are a few other “toy films” out there, such as Playmobil,
or Ken and Barbie, but nothing compared to the volume of brickfilms.
This lead to a really boring discussion among some academics about
“doll movies” from the 1910’s. Apparently,
in the early history of movies, film makers used stop-motion animation to
show dolls coming to life when their child owners went to bed.
Two guys started really getting into dropping names of movies and
directors and I kind of tuned them out.
Finally, they realized no one cared about it as much as they did
and we got back to brickfilms.
Karin continued her
presentation by showing two films by Egoless:
"Ninja Thief" and "Mummy."
She decided to skip the history and production techniques of
brickfilms, since we would be covering that when our movies were shown.
She did show “Animation
Class: Lesson 1”, although the sound was so bad that no one could
understand a great deal of the dialogue.
The excellent "The
Gauntlet" really impressed everyone, and is a great film to show
to those who are unfamiliar with brickfilms.
Karin stressed that most brickfilms are created by amateurs, but
there are a few professional examples, which were played for the audience:
The Spite Your Face version of
“Knights
of the Round Table” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the “Fell
in Love With a Girl” video by The White Stripes. At this point, a
British member of the audience felt it necessary to point out that he
personally knows the guys who create the Spite Your Face productions.
He brought this up several times, and I eventually got annoyed with
him. The technique for the
rock video is different from the usual brickfilm method, and Karin took a
few minutes to explain how it was done.
The video generated some more abstract discussion about how the
three-dimensional blocks created a flat, two-dimensional image.
Someone politely disagreed, claiming that they were fully aware the
blocks were three dimensional, during the whole video, therefore their
enjoyment of it was increased. Everyone
nodded as if she were making sense.
Finally, Karin
introduced us again and Dave and I explained how we first got into
brickfilms. Dave told the
story of how and why he made “The
Original” (as Karin has dubbed it) in 1985, and it was shown on the
large screen at the front of the room.
(Thinking ahead, Dave had put all of our films to be shown on a
DVD, and we were able to show them from there, not from compressed
internet files. This made even
the quality of our early films appear superior to the ones played from Karin’s
computer.) If you have not
seen “The Original” it is about 60 seconds of 1-frame-per-2-second
animation Dave made with a video camera in 1985.
There is no plot, or dialogue; just a few spacemen awkwardly moving
through a gate. We figured
people would force a smile to show they were still paying attention, but
to our surprise this relic was taken seriously.
One gentlemen with a thick accent praised its “archival
quality” like a “film from the early 1900’s” and called it a
“treasure.” He seemed to
be praising the lighting, which made it look like an ancient silent movie.
Dave told him the lighting was whatever light was on in the room at
the time. Someone else had an
equally baffling comment about what the film symbolized.
This is when Dave told them “Leave it to the academics to find
meaning where there is none.”
We pointed out that
we can’t know for sure that someone else did not animate Legos before
us, and that someone probably had. But
no one has published it on the internet, so for now “The Original”
stands as the oldest amateur brickfilm.
Following this, I briefly described our first joint film, “Oh
Well” from 1989. This
film had all the elements that make up brick films to this day: a plot,
dialogue, music, special effects, multiple sets, etc.
Karin wanted to show the film, and the audience seemed eager to see
it, but Dave and I were hesitant. “Oh
Well” is very primitive, and hard to watch.
There are frequent pauses between dialogue, and some scenes make us
cringe. However, it did
introduce Biff and Mario, and I thought showing the first few minutes
would be a good idea. Dave,
however, was in control of the DVD player, and decided to show our “Blazing
Saddles” shot-for-shot recreation instead.
Dave explained this was an experiment of ours to test out the
“switching heads” technique of animating mouths.
He showed the full screen version, and then the side-by-side
version with the real movie next to ours.
The scene we had chosen to recreate showed Sheriff Bart coming into
the town for the first time, and ended with the infamous line “We extend
a laurel and hardy handshake to our new. . . nigger.”
Of course, being
college professors and thus being uber-sensitive to gender and race
issues, Mel Brooks' choice of words and our decision to create a brickfilm
of that scene, caused a little stir among some of the non-American
members. A woman, who I think
was British, said she was offended by the use of the word “nigger” and
was not pleased that we included it in a brickfilm.
I asked if she had seen the movie, because I figured anyone who had
would know it is one of the most anti-racist movies ever made, and the
word is used to show the ignorance of the white townsfolk.
She claimed to have seen the movie, but thought we had “taken it
out of context” since we only did that one scene.
However, a woman sitting behind her said she had never seen the
movie, but could still tell it was a parody and was not offended at all.
Then another professor said the word made her uncomfortable, but
she “liked the discomfort.” At
this point, I had a hard not time not laughing, as they seemed to be
acting out some kind of ironic skit. Overall,
most of them seemed OK with the scene, and I think they even enjoyed being
able to bring some kind of “serious” topic into the discussion of
brickfilms.
Moving from one
controversy to another, we played the "Take
Five" fight scene from "Taco
Trouble" next. The
academics enjoyed the violence, and did not seem to find it controversial
at all. I think they were
almost expecting this kind of brickfilm eventually.
Someone comments about "subverting" Legos from their
innocent toy status and Dave and I agreed that was a large part of the fun
of making it. An American
woman asked me where I got the inspiration for the piece.
I explained that I was listening to "Take Five" and
wanted to have scenes of great violence to contrast the soothing music, so
I wrote a plot around it just to have a reason to have this fight scene.
I also cited some directors and movies whose "artistic
violence" inspired me, such as Sam Peckinpah's "The
Wild Bunch" and John Woo's "Hard
Boiled."
It was almost 5:00
and we were nearly out of time, so Karin asked us to show our newest film.
Dave announced that this was a world premier as we had not posted
it at our site yet. WDLN.TV's "Breaking
News" got a lot of laughs in all the right places and we were
given a round of applause at its conclusion.
I think the viewers were primed to be entertained, and so were very
receptive and open to it. Also,
because it was uncompressed, the quality of the brick film was fantastic,
which impressed the audience. Everyone
thanked us for participating, and the next group of presenters came up to
prepare for their lecture. A
couple of people came up to speak to us and one long-haired chap praised
us for having the commitment to make over 20 short-films.
Afterwards, Dave and
I went out for a drink with Karin. We
discussed brickfilms for a bit, including the lack of female film makers
and the overabundance of Star Wars themed movies.
Then we moved on to Karin's travels in the United States and some
differences between Europe and America.
Karin told a delightful story about how she was driving in the Carolinas
and enjoyed seeing the cotton fields and all the "niggers."
Amazingly, she said this last word much louder than the rest of the
sentence. Dave and I almost
choked on our drinks, while I looked around to see if anyone was glaring
at us. I think Karin was
making a joke in reference to the discussion at the conference, but in
this country you don't loudly exclaim racial slurs in public.
I was ready to excuse her faux pas with "She's a foreigner,
she doesn't know any better," but apparently no one heard.
We finished our drinks, walked back to our cars and said our
goodbyes.
Overall, it was a
great experience, sharing brickfilms with professors from all over the
world, and getting to meet Karin. She
is a wonderful apostle for brickfilms and is owed a great deal of thanks
for spreading the word about brickfilms and getting people to take them
seriously. I think her
presentation at this conference opened the eyes of a lot of scholars that
brickfilms are not just childish throw-offs done by unskilled neophytes,
but are an emerging art form worthy to be studied.