Brick à Brack is the biggest international brickfilming community in the world, with hundreds of people who share their passion of creating movies with LEGO®! This community organized a contest about the Wizarding World of J.K. Rowling, inspired by the new LEGO sets and the Fantastic Beasts sequel ...
The original idea for our #FantasticBrickfilms animation contest started in the summer of 2018. As big fans of JK Rowling’s stories and universe, we wanted to promote a brickfilming event based on the Wizarding World for the release of Fantastics Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Our team met in our Discord chat to discuss ideas and prepare a plan. At first, we thought of hosting some sort of "continue the story" contest, in similar style to the “NINJAGO®: Continue The Chase” stop-motion contest organized by LEGO a while back. The participant, given a prompt, would have to create a film to continue a Wizarding World story. The idea excited our team quite a bit - in fact, we even considered contacting JK Rowling herself to write the prompt! However, we ran into our first problem: few brickfilmers then had access to a wide variety of Harry Potter sets - in fact, the latest wave had barely released to retail stores. Thus, we opened up the prompt to “create a brickfilm based on the JK Rowling universe.” This allowed brickfilmers to use their parts with little restriction.
When we contacted LEGO staff about this contest, we were pleasantly surprised to see they seemed excited about the project. They agreed to sponsor our contest by providing prizes for the 1st through 5th place winners. With three weeks to finalize the details, we developed the contest rules and prepared an announcement video. This announcement video served to build hype for the contest and explain the rules. BàB team members Chris, Malo, Jared, and Trevor animated, edited, and released the video to the site’s YouTube channel, with French and English versions.
On October 21st, we announced the contest on our website. Though it was well received by the community, many members were afraid that they would not be able enter because they didn’t have any LEGO Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts sets. To motivate these members, we encouraged them to create custom characters set in the Wizarding World - even if they didn’t have Harry, Ron, or Hermione minifigs, there would still be stories to tell!
Shortly after the contest began, we were contacted by Gilles Aubin - a French teacher at Cepreco (a technical school in France). He loved the contest concept and asked us if his students from his stop-motion class could enter - naturally we said “yes!” He helped his students submit their entries and, as a result, contributed six films from their amazing stop motion class.
As the contest reached the halfway point, with three weeks left to complete entries, we released a video to help members with visual effects for their brickfilms. The community responded positively to the help; it seemed the checkpoint video really motivated a lot more brickfilmers to enter!
During the contest, we published pictures and videos clips to our various social media platforms in order to hype members and motivate them to enter. Social media has been a weak point in the development of our events; this contest gave us a good opportunity to try new things and build from member feedback. For the last week, we had the opportunity to take pictures with an incredible MOC built by Eric Pilhan. He allowed us to use his MOC in a promotional image with our custom minifigure to promote our contest.
On November 30th, our contest closed. The jury started judging, commenting, and rating all of the 24 amazing brickfilms created by passionate people! This jury was composed of five judges recognized in the brickfilming community: Maxou44, YanleJedi, Gwen Movies, Cyprigo, and Clokwerck.
The results were published on December 14th. Our 5 winners were @Nounours with his brickfilm Harry Potter à l'école des sauciers, @Speakbroccoli with LEGO Harry Potter: Death Eaters, @Arginnon with LEGO Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, @Brickfield54 with AMNESIA and @Yetgo with Hogwarts TV. The detailed ranking is available here - all films received a score and comments from the judges:
https://www.brick-a-brack.com/contests/winners/18/
Overall, this contest was an incredible experience for our team and our community. We took risks, tried new things, and inspired some filmmakers along the way. We enjoyed organizing this project and are so excited with the outcome. Our next contests are already being planned; hopefully we’ll be able to take the filmmaking magic of #FantasticBrickfilms and do it again in the future!
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Links of sources and pictures:
https://www.brick-a-brack.com/articles/article/865/
https://www.brick-a-brack.com/articles/article/874/
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