Well the animation bug has bit my household.  My kids love playing, constructing, story telling, and creating with Legos.    I love teaching the kids with Legos too.  We can do so many different things with it.  Legos is such a versatile medium to work with.   Lego animation just seemed to have a natural progression and attraction for this Lego loving family.



Though we have used Legos for many years, I am new to the Lego movie seen.  There are hundreds of Lego movies posted on You Tube. We are somewhat overwhelmed by the popularity, and technical skill required of this hobby.  But the kids really like these movies.

A few special events this past year really sparked my family’s interest in it.  Last fall we went to a movie premiere of Jericho.  You can read about this great movie and see some movie clips here .

Then some friends in our local homeschool group, who are also in our 4H club entered a Lego video contest and won with a Lego animated movie. They did a great job making their movie and have made several more. The dad also gave our 4H club a presentation on making lego animation. You can read about it and see the video here. 

So my older two boys, ages 11 and 9, have been bitten by the animation bug, and decided they wanted to learn to make Lego movies. The oldest already draws his own Lego cartoons every chance he gets and loves to tell stories with them.  Both boys can literally get lost in the make believe land of Legos for hours at a time.  So we set out to expand our skills, explore the world of stop motion, and make a simple video to “get our feet wet” so to speak.

Each boy made a movie using the same props. This is just a test run to learn some basic things involved in making this type of video. We had a simple scene of roads, traffic (cars, trucks, and semi trucks), stop lights, and people crossing the road all built out of Lego bricks. 


Here is the video made by the 11 year old.





Here is the video made by the 9 year old.



I thought the boys did great for their first time to ever do this.   Now that they have tried this out, we want to learn more.   We want to learn how to make the frames flow together smoothly.  How to time the frames.  How to do facial animations.  How to do special effects.  How to put voice and sound effects with the pictures, etc.

Thankfully, we know someone to ask, Chris Capps.   He is the same homeschool dad who gave the Lego Stop Animation presentation to our 4H club.  He has co-authored a book to help you learn how to do stop animation with Legos and Clay. 

It is a 53 page downloadable e-book titled The Animator Inside Of You.  It is on Amazon as a Kindle download and the price is just $4.93



We will be talking with Chris Capps, reading his book, writing a review, and making improvements to our video so you can see a before and after.  

Stay tuned!