My LEGO videos

Last year, I made a Christmas video with LEGO Star Wars mini sets. I was inspired to do this after taking a video course. The first part uses stop-motion, a series of photos with minor changes between them to create a semi-fluid animation of LEGOs building themselves into an X-wing. The next part with it flying uses a gimbal, a camera stabilizer to give it smooth motion. This works well going down the stairs. The video is sped up. Then the last part pans around the tree showing other LEGO Star Wars sets, with sound effects from the movies.

I created this for a LEGO magazine carnival-themed contest in 2009. (Didn’t win.) It’s an engineering feat using only one motor to turn everything: the 4 cockpit rides spinning in opposite directions, and then the entire ring rotating on an axis.

This was inspired by one of the LEGO Mindstorms robotic creations, which only had a front set of touch sensors which caused it to back up and turn when triggered. I added a back set, and programmed it so that both worked together to make sure the vehicle doesn’t fall off a table.

My first time doing LEGO stop motion. These were done in 4th grade. It was a pain, because the video software I used, Windows Movie Maker, kept crashing on my parents’ Windows XP computer with the hundreds of images I took. Each one is themed after the final battles in Star Wars Episode I and Episode II.