Ghost Train

Ghost Train started life as "The Haunted House", Ben was trying out a few ideas for films and found the notion of height checks at fairground rides in the real world to be one completely ridiculous in the world of Lego. From this his flair for art and design led to him building the entire set that evolved into what we now know as the Ghost Train. A couple of first edition stills of the set are shown below.

Original Test Set

Production proper began in the summer of 2005, we had a set, a basic script, a storyboard and away we went. To make sure we animated efficiently we put together colour coded sets of production notes to give us a guide as to how to much time we needed to leave for lines; and to ensure consistency.

Production Notes & Story Board

The animation was done mostly at night because at the time we didn't have an area large enough that we could block out. It was always our intention to light the whole scene darkly and thanks to a high quality camera we were able to do this, rather than adjusting levels in post production. The darkly animated nature of the film however caused light flicker on several takes, which were swiftly replaced. We conciously used light to our advantage and each internal scene was lit differently - details of how exactly we tackled this will be available in a tutorial, coming very soon.

This first block of animation ran for several weeks in July and August 2005, and we got as far as the Spiders section. Roughly halfway through the animation, but no voices, effects or music. Over a year passed, and at one stage it looked as if Ghost Train might never be finished but in September 2006 we finally go around picking up production again.

Animation Behind the Scenes

The second set of production saw us move to a room we could black out light and so we started to race through the sections including tackling some very interesting areas. The highlight of this was probably the Dragon's Fire section. Quite how we created the fire will remain a secret for now, but keep your eyes glued to future films and you might just work it out!

Animation Behind the Scenes

Once we had all of the animation, we had to start the voice recording. This was easier said that done, because we realised that the copy of the script for the first outdoor section was very outdated, and didn't actually work very well with what we had planned at the end (which was only scripted when we filmed). We spent a lot of time working out what could be said, trying it for time and then recording several takes.

Another concious decision was to record as much sound ourselves as possible. While we can't take credit for all of the sound effects, we can for a large majority. Tthe most important for us was the track noise, but other sound effects created ourselves include the lift, lift crash, turntables and the sparks room, to name just a few. Below is a picture of our 'sound studio'.

Sound Behind the Scenes

A few hours editing all of the rough cuts together and now here we are, the complete film.

We hope to put together a few other extras very soon, including a little Behind the Scenes documentary and maybe even a Directors/Actors Commentary, but that all depends on us getting Tim and Jim back in the studio...