Amateurism and the Aesthetics of Lego Stop-Motion on YouTube

Abstract

Do the “democratization” of media and the proliferation of online participatory culture undermine the aesthetic hegemony of professional filmmakers? This article is a case study of both more and less popular animated Lego videos, also called “brickfilms,” that asks how amateur videos adhere to and/or depart from professionalized aesthetic standards. It addresses the definitions of professionalism and amateurism and proposes that the dichotomy between democratization and ongoing elitism is insufficient to describe the complex dialogue between professional film aesthetics and amateur production—a dialogue that is diverse but nonetheless follows certain patterns. These patterns link Lego videos to silent era cinema as well as contemporary professional live-action and stop-motion animation. Furthermore, a mixture of parody, pastiche, and homage suggest that amateur work has a variety of affective relationships to professional work. Ultimately, amateur filmmaking indicates a negotiation of professional standards rather than slavish adherence.

In her ground-breaking Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, Patricia Zimmerman argues that amateur filmmaking is not simply an “inferior film practice”[1] in contrast to a Hollywood standard. Rather, it bespeaks a “historical process of social control over representation”[2] that has often affirmed and perpetuated the dominance of professional aesthetic forms. However, many current proponents of the “democratization” of media believe that online participatory culture seriously threatens the aesthetic hegemony of elite tastemakers. For example, blogger Ze Frank celebrates the fact that, with unprecedented access to media authorship tools, “millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that ‘work’ in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.”[3] Although I sympathize with this anti-elitist impulse, I suspect the optimism can also obscure contrary forces. Therefore, this study focuses on one particular area of amateur media production—Lego-based stop-motion animation on YouTube—to ask how these videos adhere to and/or depart from professionalized aesthetic standards. It investigates whether amateur production really does undermine traditional, professional norms of taste. Ultimately, Lego animation demonstrates that the current terrain of participatory culture cannot be described only by a dichotomy between democratization and ongoing elitism. Instead, it indicates a highly uneven but somewhat structured dialogue between professional film aesthetics and amateur departures from them. In some areas, professional conventions hold sway, whereas in others, “ugliness” presents an alternative to elite taste. Proclamations of democratization may have been exaggerated, but amateur filmmaking such as Lego animation does substantially depart from a Hollywood-dominated aesthetic vocabulary.

For several reasons, Lego animated videos or “brickfilms,” as aficionados call them, offer a particularly useful and nuanced view of amateur filmmaking and its relationship to professional work.[4] Every effort was made to access videos that are not only amateur but also marginalized—those in YouTube’s seldom viewed “long tail”[5]—in order to get as broad a view as possible of the aesthetics and priorities of this area of amateur filmmaking. The bulk of this article draws on a sample of 121 videos with anywhere from four views to over 300 000.[6] The aim was to circumvent some of the preferences of YouTube’s Google-based search engine, which seems to privilege commercial, high-budget materials[7] and maximizes advertising revenue.[8] Despite this emphasis on the marginal, however, these Lego videos offer a key connection to professional film, as a full 60% of the samples are fictional narratives; this is unusual in either analogue[9] or digital era amateur filmmaking.[10] This emphasis on narrative partly removes a variable that often separates amateur filmmaking from multiplex fare. In addition, the animation medium connects to various definitions of the “professional” cinema, from classical Hollywood live action to silent era film to contemporary big-budget stop-motion animation: Lego animation both illuminates connections between amateur and professional filmmaking and nuances within each category. Finally, the Lego bricks themselves are commercially produced elements of visual and material culture that elicit strong emotional responses from audiences and thus offer a view of an affective relationship between amateurism and professionalism. For all of these reasons, Lego animation offers a strong case study of the aesthetic effects of the democratization of media.

Amateurism and Professionalism

Zimmerman’s findings in Reel Families suggest that current exuberance about prosumer-based participatory culture harkens back to a view of amateur creative production more than a century old. Nineteenth and early twentieth century amateur creative production was often framed as free and inventive, an “aesthetic antidote to the total stagnation”[11] of the standardized industrial and professional workplace. The brickfilm medium can be seen as an analogous antidote to late capitalist media saturation: the bricks themselves are the product of a precise factory process, but the unruly uses to which they are put are often free and inventive. Zimmerman notes that it was not until the interwar period that hobbyist publications increasingly encouraged amateur filmmakers to copy Hollywood aesthetics. By the post-war period, amateurs were encouraged to keep aesthetics simple and controlled in imitation of the technical control of professional filmmakers[12] while exploring the primarily social function of amateur filmmaking; namely, recording the history of the bourgeois nuclear family, often in domestic spaces. As we will see below, brickfilms also engage with domestic space and carry on aspects of amateur filmmaking tradition, although much more obliquely and in a manner that disavows rather than highlights the nuclear family.

Echoing Zimmerman’s findings about the subordination of amateur filmmaking to professional standards, Eggo Müller argues that video production tutorials on YouTube also encourage amateur videographers to make professional-looking work. While the platform is often presented as a space in which aesthetics are subordinated to community building—and thus “bad” videos may proliferate—so-called ordinary users also police aesthetics according to “professional” standards of “traditional media aesthetics.”[13] These professional standards are first and foremost the tools of audiovisual clarity, such as white balancing and adequate lighting,[14] that broadly adhere to classical realist film language. Stephen Heath describes such standards as “rules for mastery”[15] that stress comprehensibility and consistency and construct a largely omniscient spectator. More than specific film forms such as shot duration or uses of establishing shots, the principles of audiovisual clarity and legibility are what I mean by “classical realism” throughout this article. Müller finds that proponents of such classical aesthetics are not only professionals; rather, professionals, semi-professionals, pre-professionals, and nonprofessionals all reflect similar aesthetic aims. Müller writes: “Like in other cultural realms, where the professional world and the world of the consuming audience is mediated by a rich, differentiated and powerful amateur culture, quality discourses function not only to create taste hierarchies, but also to professionalize dabblers and novices and make the public and professional world more accessible for them.”[16] Professionals do not dictatorially impose their standards on the amateur mass; rather, these standards are cultivated by consensus that does not overturn hierarchies but rather helps prosumers rise within them.

We see such tendencies towards professionalization in Lego animation as well. First, not all brickfilms on YouTube are amateur. Some of the most famous, such as Michel Gondry’s 2002 music video for the White Stripes’s “I Fell In Love With a Girl,”[17] are made by professionals; thus, the Lego animation medium is not amateur by definition. The third most popular video in my sample with over 50 000 views, A Christmas Toy Story—West Midlands Police (West Midlands Police, 2013),[18] is a public service announcement about avoiding theft; judging from its image quality, its provenance may be semi-professional.

In addition, as with other YouTube genres, brickfilms can be put to entrepreneurial use.[19] In my sample, the most polished and widely viewed video (almost 340 000 views at the time of sampling) is (Lego) Clean Your Room (2013) by MichaelHickoxFilms.[20]

Hickox states on his FaceBook page that, after posting original work for two years, he worked for an additional two and a half years to become a YouTube partner. This professionalization process no doubt has direct financial benefits, as Hickox’s film is preceded by an unskippable video ad. On a smaller scale, over 10% of the sample have preceding video ads and over 25% have overlay ads; even though it is highly unlikely that all of the individual users are monetizing their content, this amateur work is still visually intertwined with commercial processes. Amateurism and professionalism can be best understood as a spectrum rather than a polar opposition, and although brickfilms generally fall towards the amateur end of that spectrum, there are also trends towards professionalization. Many of these issues relate not only to Lego animation but to YouTube more broadly. However, the category of “Lego stop-motion animation on YouTube” is not just a medium. The platform encourages and limits opportunities for professionalization in a medium that, itself, does not preclude professionalization.

Amateurism should not, of course, be defined only in terms of monetization or lack thereof, but also in terms of story and content. Picking up where Zimmerman’s study leaves off, Henry Jenkins argues that digital production and exhibition technologies have radically changed the nature of amateurism:

Most brickfilms on YouTube conform to Jenkins’s criteria of amateurism in that they have low budgets and apparently nonprofessional creators, but many also confirm his comments about the public nature of amateur content by reworking “the shared cultural framework provided by popular mythologies.” Many video titles refer to Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and other commercial films, and still more create this dialogue through specific reenactments or, more commonly, visual references. This is particularly common because of the frequent use of minifigures that Lego has licensed from Hollywood film franchises; thus, Hollywood is “built into” the visuals at many brickfilmmakers’ disposal. However, these minifigures do not determine the stories told with them. For example, a Star Wars clone trooper may be enlisted as a bouncer in a bar that bears no narrative or visual resemblance to Tatooine’s cantina, as in legoloco98’s Lego City Dance Club (2013).[22] Despite narrative divergence, Lego animation on YouTube affirms that these amateur films are not “home movies” in a traditional sense, but rather public in terms of certain visual features as well as being publicly accessible online.

While Jenkins and Zimmerman both emphasize Hollywood, however, Lego animation shows that this category does not sufficiently account for the professional cinematic reference points of amateur filmmaking. Certainly, contemporary US American live-action cinema is an important reference, given the ubiquity of Lord of the Rings and especially Star Wars minifigures. However, professional stop-motion is also an important lens through which to view the aesthetic features of brickfilms, especially when analyzing the creation of movement. It seems likely that most amateurs gain their knowledge of stop-motion in part from the professional work, such as Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Park and Box, 2005) and The Boxtrolls (Annable and Stacchi, 2014), that has been so successful in the last decade of mainstream Anglo-American cinema. Of course, professional stop-motion feature films overlap considerably with live-action commercial cinema as they are usually narrative and adhere to the standards of audiovisual legibility and consistency as well as specific forms such as continuity editing. Indeed, the exacting design and animation processes of stop-motion often amplify classical cinema’s plenitude of meaning within the frame. In a different vein, we will see that another important reference point for Lego animation is professional silent era cinema, with its primarily exhibitionist mode and less standardized adherence to the rules of mastery. It is doubtful that many brickfilmmakers, especially younger ones, have direct knowledge of silent cinema; features such as the use of frontality are more likely transmitted through texts such as Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse cartoons that are heavily inspired by silent cinema, as well as contemporary, online, amateur genres that share features with silent era cinema.[23] These diverse references show that professional cinema is a web rather than an homogeneous body of work that influences amateur filmmaking.

Brickfilm Aesthetics

Although Zimmerman argues that amateur cinema should not be defined merely as an “inferior film practice,” to some extent it may be useful to resuscitate this meaning, albeit with different connotations. Frank’s celebration of “ugliness” as a “representation of mass experimentation and learning” is an instance of such resuscitation. In one sense, all of the sampled videos are entirely amateur in that they are made by nonprofessionals, whether they conform to professional standards or not. However, amateurism is used here to denote a degree of aesthetic chaos, a departure from professional standards, and thus an audiovisual marker of the democratization of media production. In this sense, most films are a blend of amateur and professional priorities. In particular, the areas of camera movement, animated movement, sound, and set design all demonstrate that professional aesthetics are a reference point but do not determine what users consider to be worthy of publication and sharing.

Camera movement is the first area in which brickfilms depart clearly from professional aesthetics without entirely leaving them behind. In 82% of the sample, the camera is unstable, sometimes subtly and sometimes strikingly, in a way that professionals would consider a mistake. Since it is difficult to keep the camera steady between frames, stability can be a sign of a videographer with more experience and/or sophisticated equipment. The jumpy effect is visually and ideologically very different from handheld camera movement in amateur live-action genres such as cat videos and stunt films, which acts as an index of the filmmaker’s physical presence. The frequent use of such handheld movement in professional horror and found footage films shows that it connotes voyeurism or documentary authenticity. In brickfilms, however, the instability of the stop-motion camera has no narrative function and connotes only amateurism, low budgets, and lack of skill. On the other hand, camera movement in brickfilms is not entirely different from that of classical realist cinema: a full 28% of the sample use larger camera movements such as zooms, pans, and tracking shots that would not be out of place in professional cinema. This is surprising because it is fairly technically complex to record frame-by-frame movements in front of the camera at the same time as frame-by-frame movements of the camera. However, many videos contain both larger camera movements and “amateurish” instability. This separates brickfilms from mid-twentieth century discourses of amateurism in which, as Zimmerman writes, amateurs were encouraged to eschew camera movements in order to avoid losing control and betraying their distance from Hollywood professionals.[24] Instead, we find that many brickfilmmakers seem happy to both lose control—to flaunt their amateurism—and experiment with difficult elements of professional film language. Professional priorities and amateurism are thus not mutually exclusive.

Classical intelligibility also coexists with amateur unintelligibility in the movement in front of the camera. Stopmotioncentral.com states that brickfilm is the “easiest way to get involved with stop motion animation” because of Lego’s durability and ease of use, with materials for sets ready-made and poseable figures that can be fixed to the baseplate surface.[25] In other words, in some ways the medium equips the amateur to create visually intelligible work. Nevertheless, it takes a lot of practice to control pacing when shooting frame by frame: it can be difficult for a beginner to grasp the great number of frames necessary to create fluid, naturally paced movement, especially at higher frame rates. This difficulty is reflected in the wide range of visual clarity (or lack thereof) in the sample. In several videos, the movement is not smooth enough to be clear, and in three of them, some or all movements are so fast that they are completely incomprehensible. 20% go the opposite direction, with movement at 4 fps, 3 fps, or even less, sometimes in conjunction with camera instability so pronounced that it results in jump cuts. In some of these, brickfilmmakers have likely opted after shooting for a slower frame rate than planned in order to make the footage visually intelligible at the cost of smoothness. The different kinds of movement in front of the camera show that, while the professional standard of visual intelligibility is a criterion of value for those who slow the frame rate to increase clarity of storytelling, it is by no means the only or even the dominant value for others. As with the coexistence of camera movement and camera instability, the professional standards of audiovisual clarity are not upheld in a single way, but rather pursued—or not—in a variety of ways.

While camera and animated movement are wildly diverse, sound follows much clearer patterns that link brickfilms more consistently to professional silent era cinema than to classical realism. First, although silent era cinema was never actually silent, brickfilms often are. In 22% of the sample, sound is not merely ambient but literally nonexistent.[26] As Tom Gunning has famously argued, the apparatus of cinema astonished early cinema viewers;[27] the silence of these brickfilms produces a similarly jarring viewing experience that places the mechanism of stop-motion on display, unsoftened by a comforting envelope of sound. Another 34% of my samples follow silent era conventions by laying a single piece of music over the image. This music is always non-diegetic, connecting brickfilms to the professional genre of the music video and certain amateur genres, such as stunt films, that also hearken back to silent era cinema.[28] Only sometimes do the lyrics comment on the action, as in lego policja 2 (themoody12pl2 gry, 2013).[29] In the sample, there is no “mickeymousing,” i.e., the cartoonish use of musical instrumentation synched to actions. Decisions to let the silence stand or to use a single piece of music suggest opposite views of the importance of sound, but in both cases, the absence of synchronous sound pulls Lego animation away from classical realism and towards the exhibition of a technical mechanism.

Even in cases of more classically realist sound design, such as synchronous sound effects and dialogue, brickfilms do not relate uncomplicatedly to professional live-action or stop-motion cinemas. Just under half of the sampled videos have synchronized sound effects and/or dialogue, sometimes in conjunction with non-diegetic music. Sound here contributes conventionally to the spectatorial mastery of classical, professional cinema by “directing our attention to a particular visual trajectory.”[30] However, the role of synchronized dialogue (present in 27% of the sample), that staple of professional fiction, is unusual. Even in professional stop-motion, dialogue has historically been rare because of the technical challenges of synchronizing spoken language to puppets’ mouths. Despite technical advances, the tradition remains strong, especially in short films. However, the mouths of Lego figures do not move, so there is usually no “failure” of synchronization. A few brickfilmmakers construct paper or CG mouths, but most establish the source of the voice primarily through what Michel Chion calls synchresis, the “spontaneous and irresistible weld” by which simultaneous images and sounds are conceptually linked “independently of any rational logic.”[31] In short, it is both easier and less realist to use dialogue in Lego animation, and this may be a factor in the predominance of narrative in brickfilms (although it would be technologically determinist to reduce it to this factor). On one hand, synched sound effects and the commonness of dialogue align Lego animation with classical live-action cinema; on the other, the purely synchretic effect of the dialogue—rather than a more realist synchronization of voice and moving mouth—also aligns it with anti-realist exhibition of a technical mechanism rather than the creation of a realist diegesis. The sound design is thus a reminder of the heterogeneity of the category of the “professional” as well as of the many ways the “amateur” relates to it.

Like sound, set design reflects a clear polarization between aspects of classical film language on one hand and flagrant disregard for current professional standards on the other. About a third of the sampled videos have mise-en-scène that consists completely or largely of Lego and adheres in certain respects to classical realism. The most elaborate sets have three or four walls, replicating sound stage construction in professional realist cinema and placing camera and audience voyeuristically on the side of the fourth wall. However, most videos with constructed Lego sets have only a back wall made either of Lego or—the less expensive option—a paper backdrop of a single color. Action in these spaces is strongly marked by frontality: the camera cannot change angle without exposing the absence of walls, and the pattern of studs (bumps) on the Lego baseplate encourages 90-degree orientation. A couple of sampled films even end with characters’ bowing to the camera. This frontality connects brickfilms to silent era film staging as well as certain sound era genres such as the musical, while the aesthetic uniformity in the Lego-built sets echoes standards of realism in professional cinema.

Two thirds of the sampled videos, however, eschew backdrops altogether and place Lego elements in human-sized, non-Lego environments in an unapologetic departure from classical realist standards and Hollywoodized glamour. Beyond the bricks, apparently unheeded, are baseboards and wall-to-wall carpet, tacky area rugs and sedimentary layers of domestic debris. These homes might be perfectly pleasant if we visited them in person, but the shiny, tiny, colorful regularity of Lego bricks constructs the human-scale elements as clumsy and unsightly by contrast. Paul Ford explores a similar effect in “The American Room,” his 2014 blog post about online vlogs, which “capture something besides what the performer intended them to capture. The big empty American room appears again and again”[32] behind the speaker, with its blank, beige walls and standardized eight-foot ceilings. These indicate that, “America might be a little more broke than it wants to show. The painfully expensive 2,000-square foot home is furnished with cheap big sofas and junk from Target.”[33] In Lego animation, what is striking is not emptiness but the proliferation of “junk,” the magnified detritus of late capitalism in homes marked as middle class by the high cost of the Lego itself. Nor is this detritus nationally specific, as the same phenomenon can be seen in brickfilms from both the USA and elsewhere. This “ugly” aesthetic is the genre’s clearest rejection of professional realist standards as it interrupts the diegesis of the Lego-based narratives without any apparent motivation.

This aesthetic also demonstrates the enduring relevance of the concept of the “home movie.” The intrusion of the human scale offers a rather monstrous echo of the familial scenes that, as Zimmerman writes, are deemed “appropriate” to mid-twentieth century amateur filmmaking. While Zimmerman’s patriarch pointed his camera deliberately at the rituals of the bourgeois family, contemporary brickfilms only incidentally expose the middle class home that continues to be the setting of this and some other genres of amateur filmmaking. This shows that although many videos may, as Jenkins writes, rework “personal concerns into the shared cultural framework provided by popular mythologies,” these publicly oriented narratives do not preclude the presence of the domestic and private at the level of mise-en-scène. These are “home movies” in a specifically twenty-first century style, where Darth Vader may stalk not through Death Star corridors but through a domestic space scattered with toys and gain thousands of views in the process (as in rody5000’s 2013 Darth Maul & Darth Vader vs Luke and Ki Adi-Mundi).[34]

Affect: Parody, Pastiche, and Homage

The camera, set, and sound aesthetics of Lego animation engage professionalism and amateurism in various ways that may be directly brought to bear on other genres of online video: for example, brickfilm sound design might raise the question of how and when mash-ups use or forgo synch sound, and we could compare qualities of movement in other forms of amateur animation to that in brickfilms. However, the defining feature and visual heart of this genre—the bricks themselves—is specific to the medium and offers a unique perspective on the ways amateurs engage the world of professionally made visual and material culture.

The affective dimension of amateur engagement with professional cinema, and commodity-based material culture more broadly, is clearest in attitudes to the bricks themselves. There seems to be an unspoken, intuitive consensus about what Lego bricks mean and what emotions they elicit. For example, even when condemning Lego’s partnership with Shell Oil, Greenpeace asserts: “We love LEGO. You love LEGO. Everyone loves LEGO.”[35] On one hand, Lego carries an intense nostalgic charge for many adults that seem to transcend or at least sidestep its status as a commodity. On the other hand, these industrially made, onscreen elements ensure that any amateur work is always bound up with a larger system of capitalist exchange (and AFOLs, or Adult Fans of Lego, are quick to note that Lego is an expensive hobby). To this extent, amateur Lego animation is not entirely “homemade” even though the films are literally made in the home. Brickfilms affirm Jenkins’s argument about the public nature of contemporary online culture on two levels. Not only do they reference the specific narratives of licensed merchandise such as Star Wars minifigures; they also deploy and exploit the affective associations of the Lego brand.

Some of the most complex discussions of these affective associations surround Lego versions of professional films. Lego versions that go sufficiently viral to generate discussion are somewhat different from the films discussed above, as many seem to be made by semi- or pre-professionals with more refined skill and equipment than most in the “long tail.” Even a true amateur directly imitating professional cinematography, editing, and sound design is supported by a technical scaffolding that Lego animators making more “original” work lack. Whether because of or despite this apparent audiovisual clarity, the discussion of Lego versions generally inspires (ostensible) truisms rather than analysis. For example, in her brief article on Antonio and Andrea Toscano’s Lego version of the trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey (Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2015)[36] Molly Lynch proclaims that “[e]verything is better as Lego.”[37]

She pronounces this axiomatically, paralleling Greenpeace’s confidence that everyone shares their love of Lego. Perhaps there is some justification to this confidence: for many, Lego versions of professional film probably hit a sweet spot between nostalgia and the comfortable audiovisual clarity of professional film aesthetics. However, the nature of this sweet spot is not as straightforward as it seems, and Lego versions read alternately as parody, pastiche, or homage. While there is overlap amongst these modes of “unconcealed imitation,”[38] the evaluative attitude is different in each mode: as Richard Dyer explains, parody mocks, homage worships, and pastiche is evaluatively neutral.[39] Lego is perfectly suited to all three in that it cannot be mistaken for the thing it represents; there is always a gap between the medium and the referent. Furthermore, in amateur or pre-professional Lego versions of professional film, this mimetic gap is precisely the gap between the amateur Lego animator and the professional live action filmmaker. However, it can be difficult to determine the precise nature of that gap and the affective baggage Lego bricks bring to amateur filmmaking.

At times, brickfilm versions of professional material seem to be inherently parodic. For example, in an article on the Toscanos’ Fifty Shades trailer, the description of the bricks seems to be offered as sufficient proof of the trailer’s parodic nature: “‘I don’t do romance,’ says the plastic Christian Grey, as his yellow, C-shaped hand brushes across Anastasia’s permanently straight legs.”[40] Here and elsewhere,[41] the juxtaposition of Lego and Fifty Shades is presented as ridiculous in part because of the accuracy with which the Toscanos copy the cinematography, pacing, etc. of the professionally-made trailer. However, other Lego trailers have been praised for similar levels of technical accuracy without being seen to mock their referents. Final Feature’s Lego version the Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015)[42] trailer has been called “awesome”[43] and “brilliant,”[44] but not farcical.

Indeed, the adulatory tone suggests that this is homage rather than parody or even pastiche. Although “everyone” might be inclined to grin at a Lego version of a professional film, just as “everyone” loves Lego, brickfilm versions are not always seen to mock the professional source text.

If it is not the presence of Lego bricks alone that encodes the Toscanos’ Fifty Shades trailer as parody, perhaps the parody derives from the juxtaposition of Lego and explicit sexuality. This is borne out by MEUSH – Lego Porn (Meush, 2013),[45] the sole porn film in the sample for this research, which seems to me to be a clear (and witty) parody.

As in the Lego versions of professional film trailers, the film language in MEUSH—Lego Porn is generally classically realist and adheres to the “rules of mastery.” The video has a four-walled set entirely made of Lego elements, it uses synched/synchretic dialogue, and although its camera is a little unstable, its animation is well-paced and lucid. The story is tightly constructed and self-aware, beginning with a Lego man masturbating to porn on his television and yelling “putain” (literally “whore”) at the screen. When his female Lego partner arrives home, they have enthusiastic sex in various positions. Before they orgasm, the picture cuts abruptly to color bars and reveals that the couple’s sexual exploits were being viewed on a computer screen by a Lego man in a black top hat, black suit, and black moustache. He swears “putain” at the color bars, ending the video by shifting the word’s connotation from sexual pleasure to frustration. The framing narrative works with the Lego bricks to position this amateur video as unconcealed imitation, withholding the professional genre’s defining feature of orgasm and costuming the porn viewer as a melodrama villain. It thus yields the “pleasure of recognition, the delight in critical difference, or perhaps in the wit of such a superimposition of texts”[46] that Linda Hutcheon identifies with parody.

Unlike the apparently universal perception that the Lego Fifty Shades trailer is a parody of professional work, however, the user comments for MEUSH—Lego Porn do not confirm that Lego sex is “automatically” or easily decoded as parodic. The largest portion (about a fifth) of the comments reflect only confusion (e.g., “WTF”). Only 13% indicate comic pleasure (e.g., “LOL”), while similar proportions indicate strong hatred without confusion (e.g., “U f***** pervert”) or approval without reference to comedy (e.g., “Cool”). A few respond to the sex without explicitly addressing Lego or humor. Surprisingly few point to discomfort with the juxtaposition of a children’s toy and sex, although comments on other popular Lego porn videos on YouTube deplore this. Does the joke play more consistently in the Toscanos’ trailer because it is soft-core rather than hard-core? Or is the difference to be found in the cultural capital of the professional referents? That is, is the so-called “mommy porn” of Fifty Shades considered to be more obviously risible than the male-oriented professional porn genre or the male-dominated adventure franchise of Star Wars? Or does the Fifty Shades trailer’s parody of a single textual referent read more clearly than the genre parody of MEUSH—Lego Porn? It is likely that all of these are factors, and the affective response to the uses of Lego bricks cannot be separated from broad film genres, historically specific gender constructions, or other social factors. However, the fact that the bricks elicit such strong affective responses makes Lego animation a particularly valuable site for seeing how amateur work is framed as parody, pastiche, or homage to professional work. What is important is that there is not one relationship: amateur work is not always an homage, which would imply amateurs’ ongoing subservience to professional media, nor is it always a parody, which would imply the opposite. Rather, all modes—the mocking, the worshipful, and the evaluatively neutral—proliferate, sometimes in and around the same text.

Conclusion

Amateur video production brings the “ugly” into a complex dialogue with professional standards, a dialogue whose power imbalances might dampen optimism about democratization. Müller summarizes Jenkins’s paradox of amateur participation in online culture as follows:

However, Müller argues that Jenkins too simplistically opposes “top-down versus bottom-up forces; the industry versus the audience, producers versus consumers, the power block versus the people.”[48] Instead, he finds a consensus system in which nonprofessionals and professionals alike are “part of already existing cultures and have to work through these cultures’ norms and conventions,”[49] including traditional media aesthetics and standards of legibility. To some extent, this is borne out in Lego animation. The four most popular videos in my sample, all with over 35,000 views, conform more consistently than most to professional standards of audiovisual clarity, and viral Lego versions film trailers suggest that links to professional aesthetics may help a video reach a broad public. Conversely, the five least popular sampled videos, all with fewer than ten views, lack almost any form of audiovisual clarity. Although the number of views is only one criterion of “meaningful contribution” in participatory culture, these figures suggest that adherence to professional standards of legibility greatly improve one’s chances of reaching a wider audience.

Nonetheless, the dialogue between professionalism and amateurism admits a great deal of unpredictability, chaos, and room for the “ugly” to thrive. In the middle of the brickfilm sample is a hodge-podge of videos that unapologetically combine and/or depart from the priorities of professional live-action, stop-motion, and silent-era cinema. In the long tail, popularity is not clearly related either to specific aesthetic choices or to adherence to professional standards more generally; many more professionally polished videos have far fewer views than more amateur-looking ones. Furthermore, even in viral Lego versions of professional films, there is no consistency in the affective or evaluative relationship between amateur and professional work: pastiche, parody, and homage all abound. Such chaos is encouraging for the democratization of media. It suggests that between the cream that rises to the top of the vat of traditional media aesthetics and the sludge that sinks to the bottom, there is a vast zone of experimentation, of moderate rather viral than community engagement, and of negotiation with professional standards rather than slavish adherence.

Author Biography

Shannon Brownlee is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her research on animation addresses experimental stop-motion as well as popular cinema. Other research interests include experimental film adaptation, feminist and queer cinemas, and psychoanalytic film theory.

Notes

1. Patricia Zimmerman, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), xv.

2. Zimmerman, Reel Families, xv.

3. Ze Frank, “Ze Frank on Ugly,” Interconnected.org, last modified May 22, 2012, accessed April 11, 2016, http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly.

4. I adopt Zimmerman’s recognized term, “amateur filmmaking,” to denote amateur production of motion pictures on both digital and analogue video as well as celluloid. Similarly, I use the accepted “brickfilm” to refer to videos made on digital video.

5. Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired.com, October 2004, accessed December 8, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/.

6. When the sampling was done in November 2014, YouTube only gave the user access to the first 740 hits of a search (the number has since increased slightly), even one that reportedly yielded millions of results. The search engine’s unknown, proprietary algorithm cannot therefore be bypassed by clicking through hundreds of pages. To counteract this, I limited my searches (“brickfilm”; “lego” AND “animation”; “lego” AND “stop*” AND “animation”) by the relatively neutral criterion of date. By trial and error, I found that December 15, 2013 and January 15, 2013 yielded no more than 740 results each and thus gave me access to the full long tail. I then sifted through the 1480 results to find those that actually were brickfilms. Given that the only about 12% of the returned results fit the bill, it is hard to know how many of the over 4 million reported instances of the genre actually exist on YouTube. My sample could have been larger, but gleaning 121 videos from 1480 and performing close textual analysis on them was manageable for a single researcher. Given the emergence of certain patterns, I am confident that this sample yields general insights, although I make no claims for the precision of my statistics.

7. Alexandra Juhasz, “Learning the Five Lessons of YouTube: After Trying to Teach There, I Don't Believe the Hype,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 146-47 and 148-49, accessed January 12, 2015, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258255.

8. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson, “The Political Economy of YouTube,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: KB, 2009), 372-86, accessed November 12, 2014, http://pellesnickars.se/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/YouTube_Reader_052009_Endversion.pdf.

9. Fred Camper, “Some Notes on the Home Movie,” Journal of Film and Video 38 no. 3/4 (Summer-Fall 1986): 10, accessed January 21, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687731.

10. Chris Atkinson, “YouTube’s Top 10 Lists – Most Popular Videos By Genre for 2012,” ReelSEO.com, last modified January 7, 2013, accessed February 10, 2015, http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-top-10-videos-genre-2012.

11. Zimmerman, Reel Families, 7.

12. Zimmerman, Reel Families, 124-25.

13. Eggo Müller, “Where Quality Matters: Discourses on the Art of Making a YouTube Video,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: KB, 2009), 136, accessed November 12, 2014, http://pellesnickars.se/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/YouTube_Reader_052009_Endversion.pdf.

14. Müller, “Where Quality Matters,” 135-36.

15. Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981), 36.

16. Müller, “Where Quality Matters,” 136.

17. The White Stripes – Fell In Love With a Girl, directed by Michel Gondry (May 12, 2009), accessed November 15, 2015, online video, https://youtu.be/fTH71AAxXmM.

18. A Christmas Toy Story – West Midlands Police, posted by West Midlands Police (December 15, 2013), accessed November 25, 2014, online video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGd-BmkOSok.

19. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, “The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture Beyond the Professional-Amateur Divide,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: KB, 2009), 96, accessed November 12, 2014, http://pellesnickars.se/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/YouTube_Reader_052009_Endversion.pdf.

20. (Lego) Clean Your Room, directed by MichaelHickoxFilms (January 15, 2013), accessed November 11, 2014, online video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKdA4Qw1VRk.

21. Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture,” Web.mit.edu, accessed October 10, 2015, http://web.mit.edu/21fms/People/henry3/starwars.html.

22. Lego City Dance Club, directed by legoloco98 (January 15, 2013), accessed November 11, 2014, online video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13UABs56NXg.

23. Joost Broeren, “Digital Attractions: Reloading Early Cinema in Online Video Collections,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: KB, 2009), 154-65, accessed November 12, 2014, http://pellesnickars.se/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/YouTube_Reader_052009_Endversion.pdf.

24. Zimmerman, Reel Families, 124.

25. “Brick Animation,” Stopmotioncentral.com, last modified 2007, accessed November 1, 2014, http://www.stopmotioncentral.com/brickanimation.html.

26. Two videos in the sample seem to have ambient sound recorded at the same time as the picture, so that the sounds are in pieces a fraction of a second long.

27. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1995), 114-133.

28. Broeren, “Digital Attractions,” 159-60.

29. Lego policjia 2, directed by themoody12pl2 gry (January 15, 2013), accessed November 11, 2014, online video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYPUhyPsz2U.

30. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 11.

31. Chion, Audio-Vision, 63.

32. Paul Ford, “The American Room,” Medium.com, last modified July 30, 2014, accessed July, 15 2015, https://medium.com/message/the-american-room-3fce9b2b98c5.

33. Ford, “The American Room.”

34. Darth Maul & Darth Vader vs Luke and Ki Adi-Mundi, directed by rody5000 (January 15, 2013), accessed November 11, 2014, online video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThH97up3juU.

35. Greenpeace, LEGO: Everything is NOT Awesome, description of online video, last modified July 8, 2014, accessed March 10, 2015, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhbliUq0_r4.

36. Fifty Shades of Grey – Lego Trailer, directed by Antonio and Andrea Toscano (February 2, 2015), accessed May 11, 2015, online video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7AvZPTT4kU.

37. Molly Lynch, “‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Lego Trailer is Better than the Real Thing,” Mashable.com, last modified February 5, 2015, accessed March 12, 2015, http://mashable.com/2015/02/05/50-shades-of-lego/.

38. Richard Dyer, Pastiche (London: Routledge, 2007), 23.

39. Dyer, Pastiche, 22-48.

40. “Lego Fifty Shades of Grey Trailer Really Stacks Up,” CBC.ca, February 6, 2015, accessed May 11, 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/lego-fifty-shades-of-grey-trailer-really-stacks-up-1.2947528.

41. Lynch, “‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’” Julie Miller, “See the Sexy Fifty Shades of Grey Trailer Recreated with Legos,” Vanity Fair Hollywood, February 6, 2015, accessed May 11, 2015, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/02/fifty-shades-of-grey-legos-trailer. Roo Ciambriello, “Everything is Painfully Awesome in Fifty Shades of Grey Trailer Remade with Legos,” Adweek, February 9, 2015, accessed May 11, 2015, http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/everything-painfully-awesome-fifty-shades-grey-trailer-remade-legos-162865. Lizzie Plaugic, “The Fifty Shades of Grey Trailer is so Much Better in Lego Form,” The Verge, February 7, 2015, accessed May 11, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/7/7995929/50-shades-of-grey-trailer-legos-video.

42. LEGO Star Wars The Force Awakens Trailer, directed by FinalFeature (November 29, 2014), online video, accessed June 15, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BKHhP8sUR8.

43. “Someone Has Already Recreated the Star Wars Trailer With Legos – And It’s Awesome,” BusinessInsider.com, April 17, 2015, accessed May 11, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/star-wars-trailer-legos-force-awakens-2015-4.

44. Jack Shepherd, “Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens Trailer: From Lego to Mathew McConaughey, the Best Video Reactions on the Internet,” Independent.co.uk, April 17, 2015, accessed May 11, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/star-wars-7-the-force-awakens-trailer-from-lego-to-mathew-mcconaughey-the-best-video-reactions-on-10185527.html.

45. MEUSH – Lego Porn, directed by Meush (December 15, 2013), online video, accessed November 25, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HsCHJpOUg.

46. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95.

47. Müller, “Where Quality Matters,” 128.

48. Müller, “Where Quality Matters,” 128.

49. Müller, “Where Quality Matters,” 137.