Ben-Jammin Pictures presents....

Hello all, and welcome to the world premiere of my movie (and the world premiere of Ben blogging, for that matter).

I know many of you may have been wondering why a grown man would ask for Lego for Christmas.  Let me answer that for you.  Animation is Ben's favorite pastime.  And to animate, you need, well, Lego.  Clay modeling was never my forte, so I took the easy way out and used pre-made models.  I say that I took the easy way out, but behold, I do err, for it was not very easy at all.  Stop-motion animation is a painstaking process whereby the animator (yours truly) poses the models (Lego in this case) and takes a single picture of the pose, then modifies the pose ever so slightly and takes another picture, and so on, until there are enough pictures that can be strung together to tell a story.  And that's just the video; audio still needs to be added.

I visited a few royalty-free sound effects websites and downloaded all the sounds used in this movie, modifying them to suit the action, turning the volume up and down as was called for, and at times even blending different sounds together.  This was a process that I didn't fully appreciate until I realized how much it adds to the final movie, nor did I appreciate how freaking hard it would be, or I would have been more conscious of it when writing the movie.

Music was the final addition.  I took three music tracks and spliced them all together to match the pace of the action, keeping in mind the tempo and any key changes....blah blah blah.  My point is that all of it was very hard and I just want to brag about it for a little while.  So...

This movie contains:

approx. 1600 still photos,

about 25 sound effects,

1000+ pieces of Lego,

2.5 months of blood, sweat, and yes, tears, and

the infinite support and understanding of my wife through these dark times.

I've said all I wanted to say, and if you've actually made it this far reading without getting bored and leaving to visit some other cooler website, you deserve to see what all the fuss is about. Without further ado, I present:

INDIANA JONES AND THE STOP-MOTION CRUSADE!!!!!

Thank you, thank you.  No pictures, please.