A Joyous Celebration of the 1×1 Round Eye Tile
July 1, 2018 10:43 AM   Subscribe

Sheep (YouTube, 5:46) is an animated short film created with Lego. It cleaned up at the 2017 Brickfilmers Guild Film Festival, receiving awards for Best Cinematography, Best Story and Screen Play, Best Sound Effects, Best Music Score, and Best Brickfilm.

"Sheep" was animated by Maxime Marion (who posts on YouTube as studiosepsilon), based on characters created by Kloou. Marion is also the creator of the Henri & Edmond (YT playlist) series.

"Brickfilms" are animated videos produced using Lego or other plastic building toys. They have a long history, which can be traced to at least the 1989 classic The Magic Portal by Lindsay Fleay. The Brickfilmers Guild is an "online artist guild created to spotlight and connect those that practice the art of brickfilming." The site features (among other things) a blog, podcasts, news, and a brickfilm library that includes a long list of tutorials.

(Post title taken from this Brothers Brick post describing Sheep.)
posted by nickmark (10 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
mmmmm Leg'o Lamb
posted by adept256 at 12:02 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Very cute! The stop-motion Lego animation was really well executed.
posted by biogeo at 12:45 PM on July 1, 2018


The stop-motion use of Lego in these films just reinforces my main reaction to all the theatrical "Lego Movies". Why did they bother to use CGI?
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:01 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was mentally breaking down technique as I watched it. The sheep are an ingenious design with a head that is one curved slope piece and two eyes, which is easily removed and replaced with, what I imagine to be, dozens of three piece configurations to show various expressions.

Plus, there's a lot of eye acting here with hardly any mouth. The filmmakers definitely studied their Wallace and Grommit.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:34 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


The filmmakers definitely studied their Wallace and Grommit.

Yeah, there are a lot of things that are really reminiscent of Sean the Sheep; I meant to mention that in the FPP.
posted by nickmark at 2:22 PM on July 1, 2018


Wonderful! Been away from Metafilter for a while due to reasons, come back and find this. Fantastic! Best of the web and all that. Hats off to you! Or on.
posted by asok at 3:07 PM on July 1, 2018


That was wonderful.
posted by 4ster at 7:03 PM on July 1, 2018


"Lego Movies". Why did they bother to use CGI?
Cheaper, with more readily available talent. It takes ungodly amounts of time per second of final film to do this the old-fashioned way.

Cool video though. Semi-relatedly Michel Gondry has a notable 2001 brickfilm for the White Stripes' Fell in Love with a Girl , which contains some of the best realistic 3D lego-animated human faces I've seen.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:36 PM on July 1, 2018


Semi-semi-relatedly, I just saw a Lego documentary which said they chose the original colours for the Lego bricks based on Piet Mondrian's minimalist paintings, and now I note the Fell in Love with a Girl video mostly sticks to those same colours, with only brief appearance of that late-comer, green.

The eye bricks are really expressive, and I'm impressed how much they can get from rotating them.
posted by RobotHero at 11:54 PM on July 1, 2018


I watched a couple parts multiple times before I could convince myself they really were rotating the eyes and not like, they had somehow found misregistered eyes that were offset slightly.
posted by RobotHero at 9:13 AM on July 2, 2018


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