Hey Warren, welcome to brickfilming!

Don’t worry about having no budget – all you need is LEGO, a computer and a camera (and lighting). You have all of that. The only thing that sounds like it could become problematic for you is the camera.

- Recording audio dialogue with a cell phone might be possible (largely depending on what cell phone you have), but the audio quality will most likely be not good enough. Something else you could try is asking other people on these forums (or other brickfilming forums) to record some lines for you to animate on.

- Only doing Star Wars movies? Hmm, that’s kind of narrowing things down a lot. Four buckets of LEGO parts might be plenty to build sets and everything. Remember that you only need to build what the camera will see: you can make a full set by building two walls only. Only 2 figures might be problematic, but (if you can get decent voice actors) you can do a lot with just two characters. There’s a lot of brickfilms out there with only two characters (this one, for example).

- Do you mean a baseplate? It’s possible to build sets without one, but it would be better if you did have a baseplate.

- Ahh, the camera might be most problematic of all. First of all, make sure your camera has these three “requirements”. With 3.3 Megapixels, you have met the last requirement, so that’s cool.
1. Manual focus
2. Manual settings
3. High resolution
If your camera misses one of these things, then it’s not suitable for brickfilming: you’ll need manual focus to be able to get the guys in screen without them being blurry. You’ll need manual settings so that the settings don’t change in between two frames. High resolution is very handy so people can see what’s going on.

Another two things important things are 1) your camera must be able to connect to a computer directly, and 2) your camera should have the ability of remote control, so that you don’t have to touch your camera while animating. These two are important, because this way you can work with your computer a lot more. It’s very important that you don’t have to touch your camera, because if you do, your end result will most likely be very shaky and everything, like this brickfilm.

I don’t have manual focus. Are you sure that puts me out of the range for that?That really sucks. I have 2/3 of the requirements.

Also, I mean to say I’m going to have Lego Skits only in the realm of Star Wars not meaning I’m only going to use 2 of my guys. I have tons of Lego guys but only 2 to do a complete skit.

Question as well, what should I do first. The voice acting or the shooting?So when I lay them down on the Windows Movie Maker I can sychrnoice them.

You should probably record voice acting first, then animate the movement to the audio track. If you animate then record the result tends not to match up, and look a bit jerky and out of place.
As for not having manual focus, that will be a problem, since you need to be so close to Lego to film anything. A webcam could help, provided it is manual focus, or alternatively you could use the digital camera and a magnifying glass to get focus closer to what you need as in this thread. What brand webcam would the one you have be? We could probably help walk you through using it a bit better if we knew
Welcome to Brickfilms!

OKAY OKAY!!EVERYONE!!Listen up, I just got lucky. While cleaning up I found my webcamera. So I’m very excited. I don’t have any of the cds or software that came with it. All I know is its a logitech one that is all black, the back end has an adjustable stand that pretty much can do everything and finally it has a speaker in it(by the way is this speaker useable just for audio?). So please help.

Lol, Thanks for the support. I’ve started multiple scripts and scrapped the first one which was a joke following the whole idea about Order 66. My next idea is probably going to follow something on a cantina of some sort. Haven’t decided yet.

Hey, I got a huge problem with my damn webcam. I plugged it in and Windows went through and start downloading stuff and then it finished. I said okay and then went to look for it in my programs, its not there. What do I got to do to get this in my computer?Everytime I plug it in, it does that ‘bloopbugh’ lol. Need help for the love of god.

I got the driver to work and the webcam is working fully. The only thing is I don’t know how to transfer my pictures into a save folder or something so I can put them onto a Movie Maker. Any help with this?