Useful book: Your LEGO Movies, the perfect director's manual

The offer of books around LEGO products continues to grow and if some of them are simple collections of beautiful creations to leaf through from time to time or catalogs filled with official visuals surfing on the popularity of such and such range, other books are more intended to help develop your creativity in a less passive way.

Your LEGO Movies: The Perfect Director's Manual falls into this last category of books from which one discovers a particular subject and one improves certain techniques in passing. This is the French version of the book The LEGO Animation Book written by David Pagano (paganomation) and David Pickett (brick 101), two benchmark Brickfilms directors.

For those who do not yet know, a Brickfilm is a video sequence featuring LEGO bricks and minifigs animated frame by frame (stop motion). Directing a Brickfilm therefore requires a lot of patience and creativity, but also requires some serious technical knowledge on the part of the director for the result to be visually successful. Many try, few manage to produce original content that is really enjoyable to watch.

This book is a real guide that will help the bravest to embark on this time-consuming and demanding activity. But did you really have to write a book to learn how to make an animated film? Both authors have thought of everything and this guide has an interesting common thread that highlights the purpose of the content, the video below. Many shots of this film are also used as illustrations for the various chapters of the book.

Watch a first time The Magic Picnic like an ordinary spectator before you start reading the book and then return to it with your eye of a director in the making to understand how the techniques presented in the book are implemented. You will then have set foot in this hobby which allows you to approach the passion for LEGO from an original angle.

Over the 216 richly illustrated pages, Your LEGO Movies: The Perfect Director's Manual really tackles all aspects of making brickfilms, from script writing to post-production, selecting a suitable camera, setting up optimized lighting and creation of special effects. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I had the impression that I had in my hands a product that really covered the subject.

As a regular viewer of the various more or less successful brickfilms that flood Youtube, I found answers to the questions I usually ask myself by discovering certain creations that fall short of recurring technical gaps: How to properly light a scene and especially keep the same level of lighting throughout the sequence, how to ensure perfect fluidity of the animation, how to tell a story with a beginning and an end, etc ...

Well-informed directors may only find there reminders of elementary rules that they already know by heart, but fans who want to get started will have in their hands a fun and well-researched manual that should help them methodically solve all problems. which they may face in their quest for the perfect Brickfilm.

Be careful, the book is not the result of an extreme popularization of this hobby which seeks to appeal to very young audiences. The assistance of an adult to explain certain technical terms to the youngest will therefore be welcome, in order to allow them to continue to progress in their discovery of this art.

I meet a lot of LEGO fans who have at least once wanted to create their own films. Most don't really know where to start and just spend hours looking at the creations of talented directors who don't really share their crafting secrets.

Their numerous attempts to produce something correct in turn sometimes end up discouraging them definitively, either because the result does not live up to their expectations, or because their audience generally does not fail to point the finger with a finger. your condescending the faults of their creation. Our skills as parents on the subject are often very limited and this book is in my opinion a relevant solution to give the youngest the keys to an enriching and creative activity.

David Pagano and David Pickett make an effort here to be truly didactic and the book is organized into thematic chapters to which those who have already started their career as an animator / director can refer to in case of doubt or need to find an answer. specific to a particular technical question.
I say yes, to arouse vocations or to deepen the subject.

The book, edited by Huginn & Munnin, is available at amazon at the price of 18.95 €. To offer with a small box to move without delay from theory to practice.

Note: we do as usual, you have until October 7, 2017 at 23:59 p.m. to manifest yourself in the comments.

Update : The winner was drawn at random and was notified by email, his nickname is indicated below. Without a response from him to my request for contact details within 5 days, a new winner will be drawn.