Brick à Brack

Become a member and enjoy many benefits, it's fast and free!

Now on Brick à Brack

Latest news

The new heroes from Hamburg

By Max_LGManiac

It's a beautiful summer day in Germany today. The sun at its zenith begins to bite the skin of passers-by who begin to pile up in single file in front of a glass building. After a few moments of waiting, the first customers get the precious sesame. They walk past a wide corridor soberly decorated with raw concrete and a classic film poster. All they have to do is follow the long flamboyant red carpet to reach the vast cinema. Comfortably seated in their armchairs, the audience perceives the tension in the room. In a few minutes, they will witness a moment of both excitement and anxiety. The first rows are already filled with spectators. Some of them are staring at the black screen or frantically reading the program distributed at the entrance of the room. So what's going on behind the scenes at this point that makes the audience so strange about attending this screening? Among the hustle and bustle, a solemn phrase cleaves the crowd in one fell swoop: "Welcome to this fourteenth edition of the Steinerei DIY Film Festival". The light is dimmed, the silence is made. A great moment in the world of German-language brickfilm has just begun.

Among the members present in the room, the team Legostudio01 and A&M Studio recall how their previous participation won the first place of the festival for the category "Best Brickfilmer".
In the Stone Age, a caveman observing the life habits of his prehistoric group and suddenly struck (in every sense of the word) by creative genius: the invention of the wheel. Roll has the quality of being a carefully staged brickfilm. This short story begins with the same idea of Newton's famous myth of the apple falling from the tree. The main clichés of the brutal and unintelligent prehistoric man serves the omnipresent humour of the brickfilm. The designers have skilfully mixed the different size scales for their background decor. The decor is simple but evocative enough to express outdoor scenes. The light juggling with cold and cavernous atmospheres or with luminous and coloured atmospheres. The sunrise despite a good staging idea revealing a rich palette of color seems too supernatural to be credible. The overall effect makes it a great success in terms of thefluid and neat animation.

A few seats away, the creator of Insight Lego-AG takes advantage of the few minutes of relief during the screening to take a look at the jury members. He remembers that the previous team had recognized his talent by rewarding him with the Jury Prize. The crossed destiny of two characters Tim and Max confronted with the harsh reality of the disease. The plot is five minutes long, approaches the theme of guilt and forgiveness skillfully. From a technical point of view, the brickfilm is still perfectible. Notably on his animation sometimes hesitant and camera movements daring but clumsily orchestrated. Despite this, we let ourselves be carried away by the global staging and the quality of the emotions in these plastic figurines.

For @Boettcher Productions, the new edition looks more complicated for him. Of all the people in the room, he is probably the most tense. This year, however, he is not participating. He has the hard responsibility to organize this new edition and to make sure that no problems spoil the ceremony. Sitting in the room, he looks impatiently at the crowd around him. Among them, some faces look familiar. Probably regular visitors from previous editions whocome back to admire the new creations of the year. The latter for the category of the "Audience Award" had awarded last year his brickfilm. Der Wolf im Knusperhäuschen is a revisit of the famous children's tale. The very imaginative scenario transports us in a new modern version of Little Red Riding Hood. The hunter, the wolf, the grandmother are all present and (truly) useful to the plot. Mixing action and humour, the spectator immediately adheres to this strange story thanks to the study of its staging which are mainly due to its rhythm of assembly, its framing, and the care brought to the decoration. A real coup de coeur since this participation was systematically rewarded in the top 3 for all categories of this festival.

These are only three brickfim that are presented to you today, but many others would deserve an article to highlight their fantastic work. So, don't hesitate to find the previous playlist of the Steinerei 2017 until the 2018 one is made public.
The screening is already over. The lights come back on. The spectators have just discovered the festival's finalist brickfilms. In one corner of the room, the jury observes and squints at each other on the marks to check that everything is in order. Gathering their notes, they reveal them to the audience present while calling one by one the winners who are invited to join them on the podium to greet the public and receive their (well-deserved) prize in person. It is now time for us on the other side of the world to discover together the results of this new edition: