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Where no minifig has gone before...

      In August of 2002, I finished filming a short brick animation movie called “Duel At Kamino.”  It was about four minutes long, and it was a recreation of a sequence from Star Wars: Episode II in which Obi-Wan Kenobi fights Jango Fett.  The movie had effects in every shot, all produced in a program called Axogon Composer and a 3D program called Ray Dream Studio.  It was my first brick animation made entirely without the Lego Studios product, which I stopped using because of stability and quality problems.  To allow for the highest quality possible, I bought a new, higher quality web camera to film the movie with.  I was pleased for the most part with the way it came out, and decided
that if I wanted to make longer movies, it would be best to do them with something besides the ‘Studios’ software.  When I started trying to think of a movie idea, I knew I wanted to try to improve my special effects abilities, and choose something that would be interesting, but have lots of challenging effects.  I knew I wanted to try to effects that hadn’t already been seen in a brick film before.  Initially, I thought I might like to do another Star Wars movie because I owned several Star Wars sets.  I wrote a 25 page script

for a Star Wars movie about a Storm Trooper, but I decided it was a little too long and I realized that unless I added an interesting twist to the Star Wars theme, it would just be another Star Wars brick animation.

      I decided to try to come up with something fresh and original, and thought that a Star Trek movie would be interesting.   At the time there were a few Star Trek themed animations, but most of them were short and not very involved.   So I thought of the idea…what if Star Trek characters interacted with Star Wars characters? That is the premise for this movie.

The Script

The day I came up with the concept I wrote a 12 page long first draft for a movie called “Star Trek meets Star Wars.”  It had a similar story to the final version, but it was hastily and badly written.  It also suffered from lame jokes like “That wasn’t in the script!”  Later I wrote a second draft that had many improvements, and soon after made a third draft.  Around this point, I decided that the script was good enough to start work on the movie.

Root Beer Studios had recently started doing a few test brick animations with his Lego Bricks, and he decided he’d like to help out.  I made countless visual effects tests, and was constantly revising the sets. After a few months of this, we began filming.  Throughout filming, I kept thinking of new things to add to the film.  The biggest addition after filming started was the addition of Han Solo to the story. Surprisingly, he was not added to the script until about 25% of film was complete.  I decided that if I was going to have the movie with original trilogy characters, Han Solo was essential.  So, I wrote a new version of the script, that without changing anything I had already filmed still made Han an important part of the story.  I didn’t have a Han mini figure, so I bought one off of BrickLink, as well as a Chewbacca.  This version, the sixth draft, was very close to what I used in the final movie.

This version, the sixth draft, was very close to what I used in the final movie.  For those of you who aren’t very familiar with Star Trek, and haven’t seen the movies, many of the jokes will be missed.  For example, the sequence in which the Borg Queen asks C3-PO to destroy Picard’s shuttle, which is about to destroy the Death Star, is a homage to a scene in the Star Trek movie “First Contact,” in which the Borg Queen orders Data, an android, to destroy a warp shuttle in an attempt to change history.   And likewise, if you haven’t seen the Star Wars movies, some humor will be lost.  I chose the name “Attack of the Drones,” because it sounds similar to the name of Star Wars Episode II, but instead of clones attacking, the villains are Borg drones.

Visual Effects

Axogon Composer – Axogon Composer is a good free program for compositing and adding effects such as lasers, lightsabers, and smoke.  I also used it for the movie’s transporter effects.  The most recent version of this program is very expensive; I use the free beta version.  The beta version can be downloaded at: http://www.bricksinmotion.com

Carrara Studio – Carrara Studio is a powerful, yet relatively inexpensive 3D modeling and rendering package.  I used it to animate the ships, and create effects such as engine glow and sparks.  For more information, go to: http://www.eovia.com

MLCad – This program is used in modeling Ldraw models.  I built the CG spaceships and other objects in this program.

LEOCad – Similar to MLCad, though I think MLCad is a little easier to use.  It does however have an export function, which allowed me to import the ships into Carrara Studio for animation and rendering.

Adobe Photoshop Elements – This program came free with a printer I got a while back.  It is very useful for erasing strings and stilts and if used well can create seamless results.  I used it in scenes such as when Picard’s shuttle lifts off.  Also, it is great for creating textures used on the Borg Cubes and other ships.  It is similar to Photoshop, but with less features.

Layers of the effect

The movie’s transporter effects were created in Axogon Composer.  The Federation style transporter is the simplest. First, a version of the scene was filmed that did not contain the characters to be beamed in, then another version was filmed with the characters in place.  These clips were put into an Axogon Composer file, and a mix track was added that faded in the characters over about 2.5 seconds.  After this, the characters being transported had to be outlined carefully by hand, to provide a geometry for the glow.  After this, a “Simple Scatter” effect was added and applied to the areas outlined, creating a white glowing area that faded in and eventually out.  The problem is that it is still white at this point.  So, a re-coloring track is added, and set to give it a slightly blue tint to the effect. But the effect still is not ready.  In a Next Generation episode or movie when someone transports away, you will notice that there are small vertical blue streaks that go across them.  After seeing this, I added a star generator track, and gave the star a slightly blue tint, then adjusted the settings slightly.  I then used three animated mapping tracks to create moving streaks across the person being transported. I adjusted the movements and settings until they were satisfactory.  After this, I used a “paster” tool track to composite the glow with the original fading in characters and added a sound effect.  My only regret on the transporters is that this transporter effect looks more like the TOS transporter than the TNG transporter, which is a more complicated effect.

                The Borg transporter effect was similar, but more complicated.  First of course, the recolor tracks were greenish-turquoise instead of blue.  I added a slight horizontal blur with a spread track over the particles, and then used the “paster” tool to add in a layer of green fog using the Clouds generator. After this, I added another, thinner layer of particles, but kept them white. After this, I pasted in the effects to the original shot.

Some of the many layers of the lightsaber effect

 In Axogon Composer, you can get a decent light saber effect pretty easily.  Using only two line draw tracks, a satisfactory effect can be achieved.  However, I wanted my movie to have light sabers as close to the original trilogy ones as possible, so I spent a lot of time trying to make them look accurate to the original trilogy light sabers.  First, I have the shot, after color correction and the addition of stars.  Next, I carefully outlined the plastic light sabers.  I personally use six points on my sabers.  One on each corner of the blade, and one between each of the two corners to create a curved tip.  After outlining the sabers, I created a fill shape track.  I left all the default settings except for the geometry, which I set to the first of the two sabers.  The only reason for this track is so that I can add an aureole track after it.  Next I added an aureole track. I set the color for red, and played around with the settings a bit. After this came another fill track, to give the saber a white core.  I did likewise with the other saber, giving the effect seen on the image to the right.  The sabers still look soft and blurry, though.  So I added a recolor track and adjusted the contrast, brightness and saturation.  This gave a very bright, solid effect. At this point it was too bright, but once I pasted it in to the video with the paster tool and adjusted the settings, it looked better.   After roto-scoping the sabers frame by for the entire shot, I added clashes and more atmospheric effects.  The result can be seen to the left.  The light sabers produced using this method look, in my opinion, better than the ones created by EffectsLab, but not only is Axogon free, the blade at the base of the hilt matches up slightly better.  I used a similar technique for phasers and blasters.

All of the outer space shots in this movie had computer-generated spaceships in them.  The first ship to be “built” for the film was a Borg Cube.  I wanted it to look like it was made of bricks, yet have all of the complicated glowing and metal textures that give a Borg vessel its distinct look. So, I made a small cube shape with my 3D software, and added plastic brick style “studs” to the top of the cube.  After building this model, I used pictures of Borg Cubes from the movies and TV shows to create glow mapping, textures, and bump maps, which made the ship look like a Borg Cube.   I did the same with other shapes until I had all the Borg Ships used in the film.  Once I had one Borg Cube, I could copy it as many times as I needed, and pose the cubes at different angles.

Before and after texturing

The Borg ships are not the only vessels shown in the movie, however.  For the other ships, I decided to go with a more clearly plastic brick look.  I built the models for the ships in MLCad, then used LEOCad to export them into a 3ds format, which I could then import into Carrara.  Once in Carrara, I added glow to parts of the ship, and on the Enterprise, I added a label and some lights.   The Enterprise design, especially on parts of the saucer, was inspired by a design I found at www.truedimensions.com   I liked the way the saucer was shaped in that rendition of a Galaxy class starship. The most detailed vessel in the movie was probably the Mon Calamari Cruiser.  It has a few thousand pieces in it.  The Millennium Falcon is one of my favorite ships used in the movie, and I’m really pleased by the way the model came out. It was mini scale, but still was rich in detail.  Also, it was easier to light realistically because of the rough surfaces.

Initially, when I was doing test renders, many of the ships looked very synthetic and fake because they were so sterile, and so perfectly shiny.   My solution was to use “soft shadows” on the lights.  This helped make the ships look considerably more realistic.   I also found that, in small amounts, motion blur and depth of field effects could help make the entirely CGI shots look more realistic.

This film required many sets.  Many of them had to be very large, so sometimes I would film all the scenes in a particular set, then tear it down so I could use the parts to build another set.  This was especially true of the large, all-black Borg interior sets.  Most of the sets were pretty plain, but some had quite a bit of detail, such as the Enterprise bridge, the ready room, and the battle bridge, which never made it into the final film.  The most elaborate set constructed was the bridge.  I didn’t have enough bricks to make it as large as the real Bridge, so in the end, I removed four doors throughout the room to make space for more important parts of the bridge.  The set had two doors with handles so that I could easily animate them opening and closing smoothly, and behind each door was a nearly full size turbo lift set.   There was space for two crewmen at the helm, and plenty of room to walk around in the back, where the computer controls were. The whole set had about two hundred pieces.  The Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards set seen in the last scene was also very large; in fact, I didn't have enoug bricks to build it, so when the door closes behind Picard as he is walking in the second room, I took apart the set room he had been in, and used the bricks to build the second room.

  The Hoth Base set was large, but fairly plane, mainly just white walls, because that’s what it looks like in the movie.  The entrance to the hangar, including the big grey door, is cgi, as are the landscape beyond it, and the transports flying around.  There were lots of crewmen walking around throughout the set, to make it look busy.  The Borg sets were large, but like the Hoth base, simple.  They had all black walls, with little decals here and there of Borg computer controls.  They also had large pillars through out, just like the real Borg interior sets used in the TV shows.  On the computer, I added little flashes of light occasionally, as well as green spotlights, because I noticed these in Voyager episodes.

The movie also contains many small printout pictures and objects, such as the pictures on the walls of the Enterprise interior sets, and the newspaper Yoda is reading at the beginning of the training scene.  I made a (somewhat) detailed newspaper, but most text was impossible to read in the final film.

I started this film in August of 2002, and around that time in 2005 we finally finished it.  Hopefully, Attack of the Drones will inspire others to make Star Trek animations.  I don’t know what my next project will be, but most likely I’ll try to stretch the limits of brick animation and go where no minifig has gone before…

 

 

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