Lego Movie Maker

Weâ??ve all been mesmerised by the brilliance of stop-motion animation, whether itâ??s the old school Morph or more modern Aardman Animation productions like Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run. With the Lego Movie Maker app youâ??ll be able to get behind the camera yourself to produce your own stop-motion masterpieces, and as long as you know how to get the best out of the app youâ??ll be able to produce some pretty cool videos.

Once downloaded youâ??ll be able to start out with your first stop-motion animation project and itâ??s probably a good idea to just try something simple to get to grips with how the app works and the process of taking still photography to weave together the movie. Itâ??s an easy interface to work with giving you some really easy steps to follow to get started.

Thereâ??s also a really good instructions sections thatâ??s well signposted from the opening screen to give you a clear visual set of directions. The guide will quickly show you how to take the shots, add title screens and credits, work through the menu bar, edit your movie and add music, effects and speed variation to bring your animation to life even more. Itâ??ll also point you in the right direction to share your movie once itâ??s complete, so that you can save it to the camera roll or upload it directly to YouTube.

When youâ??re actually making a movie itâ??s important to take your time to get things right. The onion skin feature is really handy, giving you a transparent view of your last shot over your current view to make sure everything lines up. However, itâ??s a lot easier to retain your position if you have a tripod of your iPhone. Itâ??s a useful accessory to have to help you produce really great looking stop-motion animation films, reducing unnecessary movement and making it easier to move your LEGO characters and set. Another useful accessory weâ??d recommend to help make sure your characters stay in place is a little sticky tack to make sure you donâ??t nudge them accidentally when youâ??re trying to turn their head or raise their arm a fraction.

Mission Accomplished

The best points of the LEGO Movie Maker app have got to be the ease of use, great instructions and useful features to add effects, title screens and credits. With HD recording, the ability to amend the speed of your animation fairly easily and the visual aid of the onion skin you should be able to create something fairly impressive with a little patience, care and the added stability of the tripod and sticky tack. Being able to directly upload your movie to YouTube is a big benefit too, making it easier to get your movies online quickly. Itâ??s also fairly straight forward to add your movie to your computer so that you can edit it even more, or string it together to make a longer set of sequences using movie editing suites like iMovie and Final Cut Pro.

Room to improve

The ability to share your movies directly from the app to email, Facebook and Twitter would be a useful feature to add, although, itâ??s fairly straightforward to do this after youâ??ve shared it to your camera roll as it is. Another useful addition would be more advanced editing capabilities to make it easier to add frames, cut sections and string them together to make a longer sequence right in the Movie Maker.

Conclusion

LEGO Movie Maker is a lot of fun, bringing a whole new angle to LEGO toys, but also giving a great tool for all manner of stop-motions animation.