What camera/lens for filming Legos?

A

Angelshare1

Well-known member
I'm trying to film the battle of Endor with legos. Got some pretty good stuff so far but running into a few problems. It's really hard to film small objects with an HPX-170 and a Canon 70D. Any suggestions on a camera or a lens for the Canon?

I tried a macro lens on the Canon but ran into another problem. The shallow depth of field won't allow for green screen and you can't really pull focus. The depth of field is too shallow. When you focus on the lego guy's face, his wig is blurry.

I'm using a lot of mini ships suspended by PVC pipe and magicians string in front of green screen. Larger models are too expensive and hard to swing around in my living room so I need a camera that can grab smaller objects.

Going to be epic though. We are doing the inside of the Death Star II, Lando, Ackbar, Wedge, Arvil, will be there. S-foils will extend somehow with use of the magicians string. Even found Nien Nunb figure.
 
B&H shows a PL mount version, but I didn't see anything for any other mount. Looks really neat though.
 
Shoot 1 frame at a time with this: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Blue-LG10002-LEGO-Camera/dp/B002L6I9Z4

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Or film it live with this:

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100% Lego! (or you can do a joke BTS showing these are the cameras used :) )
 
I'm pretty intrigued with this lens, it's interesting. F14 though so you need some serious light levels and the on lens LEDs are okay but going to make everything super flat. As with everything else, it's going to depend on how you are going to use it. F14 helps with DOF too although I've stopped down even more for macro with other lenses.
 
puredrifting said:
I'm pretty intrigued with this lens, it's interesting. F14 though so you need some serious light levels and the on lens LEDs are okay but going to make everything super flat. As with everything else, it's going to depend on how you are going to use it. F14 helps with DOF too although I've stopped down even more for macro with other lenses.
Click to expand...

F14 to F40! Just in case you need to shoot on the surface of the sun...You need light at f14 but shooting macro close ups it shouldn't be too hard to light a tiny area that brightly.
 
That probe lens looks like it could do some cool stuff with legos. You could fly throuh lego trees and past lego spaceships and into them.
They had one toy shot in the demo.
Man I really want that lens. So many cool things you could do
 
I agree, it is pretty neat. I'll probably just rent one though. Lensrentals.com doesn't seem to have it yet, I'll have to hunt around and see who has it.
 
A macro lens would be cool. But if you have a DSLR/mirrorless camera and a couple lenses (say, a 50mm, 35mm, 24, etc) you could just buy some inexpensive extension tubes. Those go between your camera and lens and the increased distance from lens to camera means your lens can focus much closer. No optical elements, so image quality isn't damaged (all that much; at least, often less than with cheap diopters). Inexpensive sets of tubes ($20-$70 or so) usually don't have electrical contacts, so you won't be able to control aperture from your camera; use those with manual lenses. For something like $100-$150, you can get sets of tubes with electrical contacts so you can control lenses via camera (and probably take advantage of autofocus, though in my not so extensive macro experience, autofocus isn't really useful). Fotodiox, Kenko, and other companies make extension tube sets, as does Canon, etc. You could also look into an inexpensive bellows system, but I think tubes would be an easier way to go (I have bad memories of bellows from by ill-spent youth working with a fine-art photographer ;-) ). Widely available from photography dealers. Here's an article that provides a bit more detail and some examples:
https://digital-photography-school.com/extension-tubes-close-up-photography-lesson-2/


Also, do you know about this book? It looks pretty good. I don't own it but I've flipped through it and enjoyed the authors' blog back in the day:
https://nostarch.com/legoanimation

Also also, are you connected with the brickfilm community of people who make lego (and similar) films? Like DVXUSER, lots of generous people, a few cranky people, and great support. This Wikipedia article mentions a couple online communities... I don't know if they're currently the best, but you can GTS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brickfilm
 
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