Creating a Brick Film requires immense patience and dexterity, employing meticulous stop-motion animation that requires each element within the shot to be minutely adjusted by hand. Once, adjusted the camera rolls for a single frame, before stopping so all the elements can be minutely adjusted once again. This process repeats until there are enough frames to animate an entire sequence – and usually, animation requires at least 15 frames to look reasonably smooth. So a single minute of footage can accumulate up to 900 frames!
Now imagine the amount of work that goes into a complex naval battle, with multiple ships, crewed by multiple minifigs, with explosions and other visual effects… Well, that’s exactly what Captain Edward has achieved at the tender age of 16 with this recreation of a battle from the 2003 film, “Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World”, starring Russel Crow and directed by Peter Weir.
Captain Edward has depicted the scene (see video below) in which the crew of the HMS Surprise sneakily allows their enemy’s ship, the Acheron to approach… before opening fire.
Captain Edward writes:
I was cleaning up my YouTube channel and thought I’d share it with you all. So here it is, for those that haven’t seen it yet!
I was quite inexperienced when I made this, and I am not at all happy with how it’s turned out, but for nostalgic reasons I decided to publish it anyway. Enjoy it for what it is; it was my first experience working with a green screen, and I thoroughly enjoyed the process.
Movie Synopsis
During the Napoleonic Wars, a British captain. Jack Aubrey pushes his ship and crew to their limits in pursuit of a formidable French war vessel around South America. The film’s plot and characters draws inspiration from three novels in Aubrey–Maturin series by in author Patrick O’Brian’s which features 20 completed novels centering around Jack Aubrey’s naval career.
Here is the scene which inspired the brick film:
And if you’re interested in historic recreations of tall ships blasting each other to smithereens, here is the final battle, which, at the time of writing, has not been depicted in LEGO form.
About the Builder…
Captain Edward (also known Jiskodisco on Twitter) is a lover of LEGO and pirates (who in their right mind isn’t?) and you can watch more of his highly skilled brick animations on his YouTube channel or visit his Flickr stream to see some skills.
