July 9, 2015 • 31 mins
What began as a pair of teens who made a film for their grandparents has exploded into its own art form. Learn all about how stop-motion Lego films are made.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
w charas of you, Chuck Bryant and Jerry and is
this stuff you should know? How's it going? He's going great, sir?
How are you pretty good? Yeah? Do you remember our
(00:24):
Lego episode? I do. That is a great episode, classic
and I highly recommend people listen to. It's where the
name old Kirk Christiansen came us. Soon as I saw
that name, that just flashed me back. A great name,
old yep O, l E. I think we should go
buy old Josh Clark and all right, Chuck Bryant, that's
definitely how it goes. Well, I'll bet you something. Chucker's
(00:47):
back in nine two when old Kirk Christensen founded Lego
and Bill and Denmark Bill, when don't you say is
the name? Yeah? You mean when he founded Automatic Binding Bricks. Right,
he didn't call him Lego at first? Um like it
was definitely more gratty. Yeah, well, he came up with
um Lego apparently, And I remember us debating this or not.
(01:09):
But so I looked around and this is what I
see everywhere, including on the Lego site that lego is
two words leg goat, which means play well, g o dt.
But lego also means I put together in Latin. I believe. Yeah, yep. Well, anyway,
when he was coming up with this, I'll bet he
never thought these are going to be used to make
(01:30):
hundreds and thousands of short stop motion films are gonna
delight millions of people around the world one day. Probably
never thought about that, No, but they do. I wonder
what old Kirk thought when he stepped on one with
his bare feet. He thought, Yeah, he's man, this is
going to take off a lot of parents for the
(01:50):
next three thousand years. It's not fun, so chuck um.
I don't know if you caught it or not. I
just made a reference to brick films. Did you catch
the reference I did? Stop motion? Well, I guess the
animation really is what it what it comes down to,
That's exactly what it is. One of the earliest forms
(02:11):
of animation because, um, all it involves is moving something,
taking a photo of it, moving it just a little
bit more, taking another picture, and doing that until you
want to kill yourself pretty much. And that stop motion
animation requires a lot of patients I've made a few
(02:32):
of them myself. And when I say a few of them,
I mean one complete one with my brother with g
I Joe's with the Super eight. I made about probably
twelve seconds of one with Star Wars figures in my twenties,
and then about thirty seconds of one with Clay. I
built a little theater box set and everything made a
(02:55):
guy look great out of sculpie, and um, I think
he got out of bed, went over to the dresser,
I got a shirt, and like went and exited the door.
And then I was like, I'm done. It's took so long.
The rest of his day that you had the script
for is just no. Yeah. It looked good though, and
(03:15):
I was proud of it, but it's just not for me. Well,
you need to post those on YouTube. Man, They're on
VHS somewhere. I can dig these things up. You need
to get them on the YouTube. The world can access
your VHS tapes. So what do I Just get the
VHS tape and I just bang it on my laptop
and it gets on YouTube. Okay, as long as there's
a black monol with in the background behind you, Yeah, yeah,
(03:36):
it'll work all right. I'll have to try that. Uh
so you never use Legos though, never use Legos um.
But I do think Legos are made for this kind
of thing because not only do they click into place,
which is key because you don't want stuff moving around,
but they these days they are all kinds of pre
(03:59):
packet Lego sets that are just little film sets waiting
to be made into movies. Like I mean that that's
probably the reason why it took off so much, because
Lego keeps building these sets that are like Harry Potter
sets or Star Wars sets or Marvel Superhero sets, um.
And then there's Lego competitors like Mega Blocks that has
(04:23):
licenses for like the Halo video game series or Hello
Kitty or Barbie. Right. Yeah, so all you have to
do is get like a one of these packages, one
of these sets, and all of a sudden you have
a movie set. If you have a lot of patients, uh,
camera of any sort really is we'll see, um and
(04:45):
something that animated with basically a light source, not a
lot of stuff you can get. When I was doing it,
it was about as bare bones as it got. It
was working on a tabletop with a couple of you know,
the little clip on aluminum light you get at the
hardware store. You can use those. What are those worklights?
Work floods? Yeah, just a little worklights. They get hot,
(05:07):
they sure do. Um, and I didn't have any, you know,
I had a tripod and a camera because you want
to keep things super still. Definitely need a tripod. Definitely
need a tripod. Or if you are fancy or have
friends that are fancy and have a slider, you know,
it's it's basically like a little mini dolly that your
camera can sit on in there, you know, three to
four ft long, and then you can do little dolly
(05:30):
moves and camera moves on your slider and keep it
nice and straight. Or if you have some ingenuity, which
you probably do if you're making a brick film, you
can make your own little skateboard dolly out of skateboard
wheels and PBC pipe. Yeah, you just make a little
track and then um attached like you know, you basically
(05:51):
you can. There's a lot of ways can do it,
but like a baseboard to sit the camera on with
track wheels to guide along the PBC pretty neat. So um,
what we're talking about specifically our brick films and one
of the There aren't a lot of requirements to make
a brick film aside from what you're saying, but one
(06:11):
of them is that legos have to kind of feature prominently.
Most brick films are stop motion, and one of the things,
in addition to having like Harry Potter sets or um
outer space sets, are all these different sets that are
like many movie sets right out right out of the box.
Um are the mini figures. Um there, those are your
(06:32):
actors typically. Yeah, they didn't come along to the late seventies. Yeah,
and then now I think they're the largest population on
the planet. Oh really, Yeah, I remember there's like four
billion of them or something like that. You know, they
made more tires than anyone else. But yeah, that doesn't
surprise me. Yeah, I came along. My lego experience was
(06:53):
pre uh figure. So we had to we had to
make our own little men and women out of smaller
legos in the snowy ways. These make sense, they look cooler. Yeah.
So most brick films are stop motion. Some people actually
filmed the the um lego figures and characters moving, I
(07:17):
would guess, so I would think it's not quite as
time consuming though wire work and stuff. I bet it's frustrating.
But I mean, if you have like all of your
lego figures on roller skates or something, you just kind
of drag them along. Sure, you don't have to take
picture picture picture. You kind of film them moving with
stop motion. That's very it's much. It's the opposite. Basically.
(07:38):
It's like you said, you you set up your your
your shot, you take a photo of it, and then
you move the person a little bit, like if they're walking,
you would move their arm, one of their arms down,
another one up, and one leg out a little bit,
and the other one back a little bit, and then
take that picture and so on and so on and um.
(08:00):
What you're ultimately doing is recreating motion, right right, um,
using inanimate objects. And the way you recreate motion is
by the frames per second, which is a film speed,
and film shoots it or plays I should say, at
twenty four frames per second, which means that every second
(08:20):
of film you see, you're actually being shown twenty four
still photographs in secession. Yeah, that's for film. Video is
thirty frames per second. And there are there are variations
on all this to achieve different looks, you know. Um,
but if you are just doing the math if you
want to do a stop motion film, a five minute
(08:40):
stop motion film at twenty four fps frames per second
would be seventy two individual photographs. Right, that's for five minutes.
Five minute film. Means you have to take that many
photographs in order and in between photographs. You can't just
sit there and take shotographs. Rust just gonna have seventy
two hundred of the same pictures. There's seventy two hundred
(09:04):
slightly different pictures where one is slightly different from the last. Yes,
one way you can cheat that a little bit, um
is if you just double it up and you use
two frames um for each move. So you would take
twelve pictures for a second of um video, right, well,
(09:26):
and then just use them twice and that would make
it a four second, four frames per sent. Yeah, it's
gonna look a little more herky jerky, but um, the
nature of the brick film is a little herky jerky
anyway because of the way they move and the the
range of motion on the little figures. So it's not
like if you took completely bendable action figures. You know,
(09:47):
you can get a lot more smooth, detailed moves. Yeah,
people aren't expecting your lego thing to move completely seamlessly.
That's not how legos move. They've got I think four
four points of movement. Yeah, their shoulders and their hips. Okay,
so they don't have like elbows or knees, and then
(10:10):
technically you can say their head has a range of motion. Five.
You just acted out a lego movement. It's very adorable.
Which people could see the stuff? Josh, thanks man. All right,
well let's take a little break here in um, get
back to some lighting techniques right after this. All right, Josh,
(10:49):
you've you've built your You've got your Ghostbusters lego kit,
Lego brand kit. Right. Um, you want to make a
seque old to Ghostbusters because Ghostbusters too was horrible? Not true?
Did you like it? Sure? It was a Ghostbusters movie.
It was great, boy, So you want to make Ghostbusters
(11:13):
three because you thought two was so good it deserved
its own sequel. All right, Um, and you want to
get some lights already said you can. You can go
cheap and just get those little aluminum lights if you have,
if you really want to get serious, you can rent
lights from a camera house. You can go to your
friend Scott's sure be like, I know you have some lights. Yeah,
(11:35):
or here at how stuff works. We have the use
of lights. Yeah, if you're making a brick film, drop
Bible'll lend you some lights. No, don't do that. Um. Basically,
lighting is gonna do a few things. It's gonna light
up your set so people can see it a uh
and be. It can help you set a mood for sure,
like whether it's day or night, or noir or sunny,
(11:55):
like a bright sunny day. Uh. And what you're really
looking to do, though, is have complete control of your
your lighting, because one thing that can really thwart your
brick film is any change in lighting. You won't notice it.
You'll just take your little picture and then you'll see
flickering going on when you play it back. And that's
(12:17):
because someone turned on a light in the other room
next to you and you didn't notice it. So you
want to black out all the curtains. Just get in
a room where you have complete control over the lighting. Yeah.
That's the same reason why you don't want to shoot
a brick film or any kind of stop motion outdoors,
because the sun changes its lighting to be impossible fairly
regular rate yea faster than you can shoot and move. Um.
(12:40):
So yeah, you want to totally be able to control lighting.
So once you have your lighting under total control, you
want to use usually about three lights at least. Put
on your black turtleneck, yeah, or like your black roots
suit or something like that. Ye even better, uh huh.
And and don't let anybody see like that, because they're
(13:00):
gonna be like, you're a total weirdo locked away in
this room with no windows, wearing a black roots who
playing with your light lego mini things And you'd say, no,
I'm a filmmaker, right, brigg filmmaker and they would just
back out of the room slowly. Yeah, exactly. So, Um,
you you use one light for backlighting, use that behind
the thing behind your shot. You um have a key
(13:22):
lighting which is the front. And then you also want
to have some sort of bounce and um you can
basically replace that third light source with even just like
a white sheet of paper something to reflect light off
that that's very mobile, so you can director wherever you
need it. And the whole point of this is to
light normally, but also to chase off shadows. Yeah, if
(13:43):
you've never let anything, you're going to be frustrated at
first because you're lego characters are gonna have like two
different shadows going in two different directions, and the first
thing you're gonna think is, well, that doesn't look like
real life. So you can do two things. You can
experiment around with your phil lights until you get rid
of your shadows, or you can get a book or
look on the internet. Just some very basic lighting techniques. Um,
(14:08):
it's not super complicated. It's nobody tough to get like,
really good at it. It's not necessarily intuitive where you're like, oh,
this guy looks like a soccer player in a night game.
He's got four shadows everywhere exactly, So how do I
get rid of that? Oh, it's this bounce. I would
say this would be one of those times when it's
best to just rely on the wisdom of others who
have come before. Yeah, and that wisdom on the internet.
(14:30):
The yeah, exactly. Um, the the lights too, you're gonna
want to diffuse it. It's it's probably gonna be way
too harsh coming directly off the bulb. So um, you
can use like wax paper or a handkerchief or in
anything that doesn't catch on fire. Uh ideally, Yeah, and
you do in your grandfather's room and get a handkerchief
(14:52):
out of his gesture drawer exactly with the initials H monogrammed.
It's old krusty brown snot Yeah. I used to think
that was so gross when I was a little it is.
It's like, oh man, they're blowing their nose and they're
putting it in, they're puttying it away for safekeeping. Gross.
It was a less wasteful generation, though they didn't fill
a plan fills with clinics. That is true, you know,
(15:15):
so it took I pretty much feel like we just
gave a great clinic on lighting. Yeah, shoots some test footage.
Don't dive right in there, you know, monkey around with it.
Oh yeah, you're gonna be really mad or your thing's
gonna look terrible at first, and then get progressively better
as the final final thing goes on. Say yeah, you
want to learn by doing yeah, and yeah, just do
some exercises, all right. We talked a little bit about equipment. Uh,
(15:39):
they are all kinds of cameras you can use. Um.
What I used on the last one, which was super handy,
was a camera that had a remote control so you
could just click off the photos without having to touch
the camera. That is very advisable. Yea. Once you have
the camera set, it's really nice to not touch it
again if you don't have to. Yeah, because again you're
(16:00):
moving the stuff within this world, not the camera, at
least for the shot you're taking. And again, if you
if you have a three second shot, that's what seventy
two photos you need to take from that exact same position. Yeah, right,
So yeah, you don't want that camera to move at
all or else is gonna be some weird jarring and
stuff like that. And the best way to do that
(16:22):
is a remote capture camera. That really helps. Um, if
you have an auto focus slash manual focus, you want
to turn it off the auto focus, make it fixed focus,
manual focus you can. Again, you're just looking for complete control,
uh auto focus little you know, you don't want to
focus on the wrong thing, especially if, like um, your
(16:43):
your many figures coming closer to the camera every time.
That's gonna change that auto focus and you're every every
photo in the frame is gonna look slightly different or
fuzzy or just completely changed from time to time. Not good. Yeah,
you're after consistency, uh, consistency through control pretty much if
(17:03):
you have a digital zoom camera you want to you
want an optical zoom? What is that? Uh? It's basically
I think a digital zoom simulates the image rather than
it being actually so it digitizes the zoom at a
certain point and it's not as high quality now it
(17:24):
looks it always looks crutty in my opinion. So, yeah,
you want to control, so a true zoom basically you
remember the camera, yes you know, yeah, creep that little
thing in like a dolly right, or if you have
your slider you're all set there, so where you can
say it's like a what you basically want to be
like Nikolai cho Chesk or eat a mean of of
(17:46):
your mini films set here? You want like total control
over everything. I thought you were gonna say, like Orson Welles,
like he's to even worse. Okay, Uh so we talked
about bumping the camera. You also don't want to bump
your film set. Yeah, I mean that can really ruin
your day at the end of a long day if
you bump it and all your stuff falls over. So
(18:08):
clamp that stuff down, clamp your set down, glue it down,
do whatever you have to do to keep it as
ruded as possible. Yeah, and don't let anyone anywhere near
it now because it's my lego set and I'm the outdoor.
So we've got some more stuff, some more awesome UM recommendations,
and we're gonna get to it right after this, Chuck,
(18:49):
I really feel like we're helping a lot of people here.
I think so too. So we talked about lighting, we've
talked about the kind of camera equipment you watch or
UM and a lot of well, especially the Brick film
which we'll talk about later, UM, are silent. They're silent films,
which means you don't have to worry about sound. But
there's a lot of them that do have sound, dialogue
(19:10):
all that stuff, UM, and you don't have to worry
about recording that as you go along. Most of the
sound can be recorded in post production, but you want
to have an idea of what is going to be
said where or what what your soundtrack is going to
be like, because you have to figure out how long
each shot needs to be and how many ultimately how
(19:31):
many photos you need to take within a given scene
or else, like the voiceover is still going when you
just change scenes and your your entire family and friends
will laugh at you. When you show them your brick film.
You don't want to be the Edwood of brick films.
He just did not care. He didn't care. It was great.
(19:51):
That movie was great. My favorite or one of my
favorite parts, aside from everything Bill Murray did, was when
tour like bumps the wall in the way in and
they're like, don't you want to shoot that to or
just walked in the wall, He's like, no, I like it.
It's real. Let's use it. Um so expressions and drama.
(20:12):
These little lego folks aren't super expressive in the face,
but they suggested in this article, and it kind of
makes sense. Pop that head off and put on something else,
you know, could be a pink pong ball that you
draw faces on. Well, there there are different many figs
that have um different expressions yea, and so you can
(20:33):
just interchange their heads. Okay, So if someone needs to
look up horrors, put on the horror face. Um. And
then apparently there's companies that will customize facial expressions on
your mini figures. Yeah. And I imagine if you have
some money and you can get that done. That's right. Uh,
And now I want to go not off topic, but
(20:54):
off article and say story, story, story. If you are
going to make a brick film or any film, have
a good story. Just just because it's a two minute
lego brick film, it's gonna stink if it's just you know,
no matter how good it looks, it's not gonna be
fun to watch unless you have a good little story.
(21:16):
So like, write something out that's good and engaging or funny,
and it doesn't have to be super long to have
a little character arc or story arc. Have your guy
chased by something else. Yeah, Like I watched one the
other day and it was it was fun, It was silly.
It was a one lego guy helping the guy next
door do all his chores. Is that the the dandelion? Oh,
(21:37):
I don't know the name of it. But he was,
you know, helping him mo and helping him put on
shutters and doing all this stuff and all the while
like his home was getting beaten up, and it was
just you know, that's all they needed was that one
little joke at the end that they showed the nice
house and then the house in tatters. It's a very
in Randy and brick film. Was it don't help your name,
(22:00):
your own house will fall the pieces if you help
your neighbor well to take care of yourself. The character
was John Galt, so there may be something there. Um
So anyway, yeah, story just uh, I would encourage you
to make something engaging, uh, and then make it look good. Yeah,
all right, that's my soapbox moment. That was great. Thanks,
that was good stuff. All right. So we're onto software, Yeah,
(22:23):
I think so, because, um, you're going to find very
quickly when you have shotos, you need a way to
turn them into a video. They don't just automatically turn
into a video like that. And you can't just do
a flipbook on the internet because you'd have to shoot
that anyway and run it through software eventually. So you
might as well not go to that extra step. Just
(22:43):
get yourself some stop stop motion um animating software, and
there's plenty of them out there. There's some that cost
tons of money, some that are free. Lego has one, yeah,
called Lego movie Maker. Yeah, it's a little app you
can make your own little big encourage the making a
brick films of course, right, So depending on the kind
of software you have there there's some that will automatically
(23:05):
import from your camera. There's some that will. Um, that
has something called onion skinning, which shows like a transparency
of the last shot over the current shot, so you
can make sure everything's going the way you need to say,
if you need to stop and reshoot one of those photos,
you know you can real quick. Um, it's got to
(23:26):
be super helpful to have that. And the whole thing
is gonna put it all in order, animated, and then
it's probably also going to have some sort of whiz
bang features, Like there's one called rhodoscope which makes things glow,
which comes in very handy if you're doing a Star
Wars brick film and you want to make the lightsabers glow.
That's right. Uh. Some of them might have other little
(23:49):
c g I tricks built in, or you can do
some low fi c g I of your own with
a little uh investigating and learning on the YouTube. Uh,
it's not super hard to learn a couple of basic things.
And again, these are brick films. This one that I
watched had some low fi like fire effect, and um,
(24:11):
you know it looked it looked great for what it
was supposed to be. You know, it's not supposed to
be a Hollywood action thriller. It's a brick film, so
it can look kind of campy and corny and it
still works. Did you ever see the Matrix brick film? Now?
It was a good Yeah. I think it's it's not
even like a shot for shot thing of the matrix.
It's like a like in addition to it, it's super
(24:31):
gory and um, it just incredibly well done. It is
like Hollywood action thriller brick film. Nice. You have to
check that out. Well, there's hundreds and hundreds, I would
say thousands, thousands at this point brick films. The first
one that they I watched this one. Actually in the
ninety three, Lars and Einrich Hassing made a little super
(24:54):
eight brick film called Journey to the Moon, and um,
you know it's cute. It's uh, it's actually mother, it's
like kids playing around. But and then it looks pretty good. Yes,
and the especially when you consider that they were doing
a film, yeah, and using like film editing software and
stuff to put this thing together. It's kind of mind
(25:16):
blowing that these two kids put this together and made
basically the first brick film. What's more, since it was
nineteen seventy three, this was five years before the mini
figures came out, so they had to build their own
characters out of legos to good stuff. And then there's
another classic brick film from the late nineteen nineties by
Lindsay Flee and I think the late eighties. What I
(25:38):
say late nineties, Yeah, late eighties is what I'm at,
the Magic Portal, and that was shot on sixteen millimeter film. Uh, yeah,
it looks great. He's a he was a film student
and actually got money from a grant from the Australian
Film Commission, and um, a bunch of people donated lego
sets and it looks really good. Yeah, and it took
(26:00):
them years to do it. It took um, I think
more than a year to just shoot the photos. Yeah.
I mean, now you know why my films were all
twelve seconds long, you know. Yeah, this one's like sixteen
minutes long. Crazy. What are some of the other big ones,
Star Wars, the Han Solo Affair, Yeah, a lot of stars. Yeah.
(26:20):
Have you seen Monty Python on Holy Grow shot for
shot of the Camelot song this, and like, not only
is it shot for shot, it's so great. They got
the lighting correct on every shot. Like it's not like
there's some inside Lego World. It looks like they took
(26:41):
the original Monty Python this minute and fifteen second clip
and like ran it through like a Lego Lego Nader. Wow,
Like they got the lighting perfect. You gotta see it, man,
it's probably the best one. I have to check that out.
And there's some really great ones out here, like again
that Matrix one. I'm amazing. But um, and I have
(27:02):
to say I am a fan of the Magic Portal
now yeah, um, but this Monty Python one is just
it's just mind blowing. And that was by spite your face.
They seem to be the premier brick film studio. Yeah,
they do. Uh, they've done a lot of them. Um.
I was about to remark about the attention to detail
(27:22):
and like the Monty Python thing, but I think that's
by nature what you're getting with these people who make these.
If you don't have an attention, like a scary attention
for detail, you're not gonna be working in stop motion anyway.
So that's why Stuffed By, like Nick Park and Ardment
Animation did Wallace and Grommet and the Creature Comfort series,
they look like the detail is so great because that's
(27:43):
just their deal. California raisins remember then, Oh yeah, good
attention to detail. Yeah. Uh did you see the Lego movie?
I didn't. I didn't either. Hurdle was great, Yeah, I
want to see it. But um, is it a brick
film or not? No? No, no it's not. It was
all c g I s. Brick film doesn't have to
(28:04):
be stopped motion, but typically it should be in at
least like it should be real life Lego figures, not
c g I ones. But um, apparently it had plenty
of homages to brick films in general. Yeah, I didn't
know that. I think that's kind of neat. Yeah. So
the impression I have from researching this is that Lego
as a company is very aware of brick films, obviously
(28:24):
because they have the movie maker app They love it.
They give a ward out for brick films. Um, and
in the Lego movie, it was kind of a tribute
to brick films, a little tip of the old cap.
Old Kirk Christensen would have been like, oh, yeah, Lego
loves this stuff. You know, make a Star Wars one,
(28:44):
make a Ghostbusters one, making Indiana Jones one, bye bye bye,
don't make three Star Wars ones. Who would do that
make a Star Wars and the Ghostbusters and a and
a Planet of the Apes. Yeah exactly? Uh, you got
anything else? Mean? Nope? Brick films again. This is another
(29:05):
entry in our quest to explain absolutely everything there is
on Earth and beyond. So enjoy it, everybody, right not.
If you want to know more about brick films, you
can type that word one word into the search part
how stuff works dot com. But even more than that,
I would encourage you to just type that word into
your favorite search engine and sit back and start watching
brick films. Delightful. They are amazing. Uh. And since I
(29:29):
said your favorite search engine, it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this jokes to her husband. Hey, guys,
to listen to the podcast on revenge this morning as usual.
I really enjoyed. It made me think of a revenge
story in my own life that backfired, uh then became
something pretty amazing. My wife and are big jokesters. When
(29:50):
we found when we were first married, my wife thought
it would be funny to throw a bucket of cold
water over me while I was taking a shower. I
told her that revenge is a dish best served old,
which is, by the way, one of my favorite uh
sayings of all time UH and that my revenge would
come tenfold. So about three years and two children later,
my wife took a pregnancy test, afraid that she was pregnant.
(30:12):
Since our son was three our daughter was nine, my
wife was a bit freaked out at having another kid.
Tests ended up being negative and she was relieved. She
left the pregnancy tests in the back of the toilet
went to grab its center while she was gone. Using
a pen, I was able to make the pregnancy tests
look positive and put it back where she left it.
I never will forget the look of terror on her
(30:32):
face when she eventually saw it came walking to the
room with the test. I immediately started joking with her
about how exciting it is and really playing up the ruse.
I didn't let her dangle too much though, before telling
her the truth. It was a good time and last
for had by all. One month later, she actually was
pregnant and quickly found out that we had twins. So
(30:53):
to this day she playfully blames me for our seven
year old twin boys. It was a great uson in
karma and the aftermathod of revenge isn't always a bad thing.
This world wouldn't be the same without our two little guys.
What a sweet dude. So that Danny DeMarco started off
as kind of like a jerky thing to do, but
(31:14):
it turned out great. Nice Thanks Danny DeMarco from Dallas.
Great name to Danny DeMarco, di Dallas. If you want
to get in touch with this like Danny did, you
can tweek to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
stuff Podcast to how Stuff Works dot com and has
(31:35):
always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
w charas of you, Chuck Bryant and Jerry and is
this stuff you should know? How's it going? He's going great, sir?
How are you pretty good? Yeah? Do you remember our
(00:24):
Lego episode? I do. That is a great episode, classic
and I highly recommend people listen to. It's where the
name old Kirk Christiansen came us. Soon as I saw
that name, that just flashed me back. A great name,
old yep O, l E. I think we should go
buy old Josh Clark and all right, Chuck Bryant, that's
definitely how it goes. Well, I'll bet you something. Chucker's
(00:47):
back in nine two when old Kirk Christensen founded Lego
and Bill and Denmark Bill, when don't you say is
the name? Yeah? You mean when he founded Automatic Binding Bricks. Right,
he didn't call him Lego at first? Um like it
was definitely more gratty. Yeah, well, he came up with
um Lego apparently, And I remember us debating this or not.
(01:09):
But so I looked around and this is what I
see everywhere, including on the Lego site that lego is
two words leg goat, which means play well, g o dt.
But lego also means I put together in Latin. I believe. Yeah, yep. Well, anyway,
when he was coming up with this, I'll bet he
never thought these are going to be used to make
(01:30):
hundreds and thousands of short stop motion films are gonna
delight millions of people around the world one day. Probably
never thought about that, No, but they do. I wonder
what old Kirk thought when he stepped on one with
his bare feet. He thought, Yeah, he's man, this is
going to take off a lot of parents for the
(01:50):
next three thousand years. It's not fun, so chuck um.
I don't know if you caught it or not. I
just made a reference to brick films. Did you catch
the reference I did? Stop motion? Well, I guess the
animation really is what it what it comes down to,
That's exactly what it is. One of the earliest forms
(02:11):
of animation because, um, all it involves is moving something,
taking a photo of it, moving it just a little
bit more, taking another picture, and doing that until you
want to kill yourself pretty much. And that stop motion
animation requires a lot of patients I've made a few
(02:32):
of them myself. And when I say a few of them,
I mean one complete one with my brother with g
I Joe's with the Super eight. I made about probably
twelve seconds of one with Star Wars figures in my twenties,
and then about thirty seconds of one with Clay. I
built a little theater box set and everything made a
(02:55):
guy look great out of sculpie, and um, I think
he got out of bed, went over to the dresser,
I got a shirt, and like went and exited the door.
And then I was like, I'm done. It's took so long.
The rest of his day that you had the script
for is just no. Yeah. It looked good though, and
(03:15):
I was proud of it, but it's just not for me. Well,
you need to post those on YouTube. Man, They're on
VHS somewhere. I can dig these things up. You need
to get them on the YouTube. The world can access
your VHS tapes. So what do I Just get the
VHS tape and I just bang it on my laptop
and it gets on YouTube. Okay, as long as there's
a black monol with in the background behind you, Yeah, yeah,
(03:36):
it'll work all right. I'll have to try that. Uh
so you never use Legos though, never use Legos um.
But I do think Legos are made for this kind
of thing because not only do they click into place,
which is key because you don't want stuff moving around,
but they these days they are all kinds of pre
(03:59):
packet Lego sets that are just little film sets waiting
to be made into movies. Like I mean that that's
probably the reason why it took off so much, because
Lego keeps building these sets that are like Harry Potter
sets or Star Wars sets or Marvel Superhero sets, um.
And then there's Lego competitors like Mega Blocks that has
(04:23):
licenses for like the Halo video game series or Hello
Kitty or Barbie. Right. Yeah, so all you have to
do is get like a one of these packages, one
of these sets, and all of a sudden you have
a movie set. If you have a lot of patients, uh,
camera of any sort really is we'll see, um and
(04:45):
something that animated with basically a light source, not a
lot of stuff you can get. When I was doing it,
it was about as bare bones as it got. It
was working on a tabletop with a couple of you know,
the little clip on aluminum light you get at the
hardware store. You can use those. What are those worklights?
Work floods? Yeah, just a little worklights. They get hot,
(05:07):
they sure do. Um, and I didn't have any, you know,
I had a tripod and a camera because you want
to keep things super still. Definitely need a tripod. Definitely
need a tripod. Or if you are fancy or have
friends that are fancy and have a slider, you know,
it's it's basically like a little mini dolly that your
camera can sit on in there, you know, three to
four ft long, and then you can do little dolly
(05:30):
moves and camera moves on your slider and keep it
nice and straight. Or if you have some ingenuity, which
you probably do if you're making a brick film, you
can make your own little skateboard dolly out of skateboard
wheels and PBC pipe. Yeah, you just make a little
track and then um attached like you know, you basically
(05:51):
you can. There's a lot of ways can do it,
but like a baseboard to sit the camera on with
track wheels to guide along the PBC pretty neat. So um,
what we're talking about specifically our brick films and one
of the There aren't a lot of requirements to make
a brick film aside from what you're saying, but one
(06:11):
of them is that legos have to kind of feature prominently.
Most brick films are stop motion, and one of the things,
in addition to having like Harry Potter sets or um
outer space sets, are all these different sets that are
like many movie sets right out right out of the box.
Um are the mini figures. Um there, those are your
(06:32):
actors typically. Yeah, they didn't come along to the late seventies. Yeah,
and then now I think they're the largest population on
the planet. Oh really, Yeah, I remember there's like four
billion of them or something like that. You know, they
made more tires than anyone else. But yeah, that doesn't
surprise me. Yeah, I came along. My lego experience was
(06:53):
pre uh figure. So we had to we had to
make our own little men and women out of smaller
legos in the snowy ways. These make sense, they look cooler. Yeah.
So most brick films are stop motion. Some people actually
filmed the the um lego figures and characters moving, I
(07:17):
would guess, so I would think it's not quite as
time consuming though wire work and stuff. I bet it's frustrating.
But I mean, if you have like all of your
lego figures on roller skates or something, you just kind
of drag them along. Sure, you don't have to take
picture picture picture. You kind of film them moving with
stop motion. That's very it's much. It's the opposite. Basically.
(07:38):
It's like you said, you you set up your your
your shot, you take a photo of it, and then
you move the person a little bit, like if they're walking,
you would move their arm, one of their arms down,
another one up, and one leg out a little bit,
and the other one back a little bit, and then
take that picture and so on and so on and um.
(08:00):
What you're ultimately doing is recreating motion, right right, um,
using inanimate objects. And the way you recreate motion is
by the frames per second, which is a film speed,
and film shoots it or plays I should say, at
twenty four frames per second, which means that every second
(08:20):
of film you see, you're actually being shown twenty four
still photographs in secession. Yeah, that's for film. Video is
thirty frames per second. And there are there are variations
on all this to achieve different looks, you know. Um,
but if you are just doing the math if you
want to do a stop motion film, a five minute
(08:40):
stop motion film at twenty four fps frames per second
would be seventy two individual photographs. Right, that's for five minutes.
Five minute film. Means you have to take that many
photographs in order and in between photographs. You can't just
sit there and take shotographs. Rust just gonna have seventy
two hundred of the same pictures. There's seventy two hundred
(09:04):
slightly different pictures where one is slightly different from the last. Yes,
one way you can cheat that a little bit, um
is if you just double it up and you use
two frames um for each move. So you would take
twelve pictures for a second of um video, right, well,
(09:26):
and then just use them twice and that would make
it a four second, four frames per sent. Yeah, it's
gonna look a little more herky jerky, but um, the
nature of the brick film is a little herky jerky
anyway because of the way they move and the the
range of motion on the little figures. So it's not
like if you took completely bendable action figures. You know,
(09:47):
you can get a lot more smooth, detailed moves. Yeah,
people aren't expecting your lego thing to move completely seamlessly.
That's not how legos move. They've got I think four
four points of movement. Yeah, their shoulders and their hips. Okay,
so they don't have like elbows or knees, and then
(10:10):
technically you can say their head has a range of motion. Five.
You just acted out a lego movement. It's very adorable.
Which people could see the stuff? Josh, thanks man. All right,
well let's take a little break here in um, get
back to some lighting techniques right after this. All right, Josh,
(10:49):
you've you've built your You've got your Ghostbusters lego kit,
Lego brand kit. Right. Um, you want to make a
seque old to Ghostbusters because Ghostbusters too was horrible? Not true?
Did you like it? Sure? It was a Ghostbusters movie.
It was great, boy, So you want to make Ghostbusters
(11:13):
three because you thought two was so good it deserved
its own sequel. All right, Um, and you want to
get some lights already said you can. You can go
cheap and just get those little aluminum lights if you have,
if you really want to get serious, you can rent
lights from a camera house. You can go to your
friend Scott's sure be like, I know you have some lights. Yeah,
(11:35):
or here at how stuff works. We have the use
of lights. Yeah, if you're making a brick film, drop
Bible'll lend you some lights. No, don't do that. Um. Basically,
lighting is gonna do a few things. It's gonna light
up your set so people can see it a uh
and be. It can help you set a mood for sure,
like whether it's day or night, or noir or sunny,
(11:55):
like a bright sunny day. Uh. And what you're really
looking to do, though, is have complete control of your
your lighting, because one thing that can really thwart your
brick film is any change in lighting. You won't notice it.
You'll just take your little picture and then you'll see
flickering going on when you play it back. And that's
(12:17):
because someone turned on a light in the other room
next to you and you didn't notice it. So you
want to black out all the curtains. Just get in
a room where you have complete control over the lighting. Yeah.
That's the same reason why you don't want to shoot
a brick film or any kind of stop motion outdoors,
because the sun changes its lighting to be impossible fairly
regular rate yea faster than you can shoot and move. Um.
(12:40):
So yeah, you want to totally be able to control lighting.
So once you have your lighting under total control, you
want to use usually about three lights at least. Put
on your black turtleneck, yeah, or like your black roots
suit or something like that. Ye even better, uh huh.
And and don't let anybody see like that, because they're
(13:00):
gonna be like, you're a total weirdo locked away in
this room with no windows, wearing a black roots who
playing with your light lego mini things And you'd say, no,
I'm a filmmaker, right, brigg filmmaker and they would just
back out of the room slowly. Yeah, exactly. So, Um,
you you use one light for backlighting, use that behind
the thing behind your shot. You um have a key
(13:22):
lighting which is the front. And then you also want
to have some sort of bounce and um you can
basically replace that third light source with even just like
a white sheet of paper something to reflect light off
that that's very mobile, so you can director wherever you
need it. And the whole point of this is to
light normally, but also to chase off shadows. Yeah, if
(13:43):
you've never let anything, you're going to be frustrated at
first because you're lego characters are gonna have like two
different shadows going in two different directions, and the first
thing you're gonna think is, well, that doesn't look like
real life. So you can do two things. You can
experiment around with your phil lights until you get rid
of your shadows, or you can get a book or
look on the internet. Just some very basic lighting techniques. Um,
(14:08):
it's not super complicated. It's nobody tough to get like,
really good at it. It's not necessarily intuitive where you're like, oh,
this guy looks like a soccer player in a night game.
He's got four shadows everywhere exactly, So how do I
get rid of that? Oh, it's this bounce. I would
say this would be one of those times when it's
best to just rely on the wisdom of others who
have come before. Yeah, and that wisdom on the internet.
(14:30):
The yeah, exactly. Um, the the lights too, you're gonna
want to diffuse it. It's it's probably gonna be way
too harsh coming directly off the bulb. So um, you
can use like wax paper or a handkerchief or in
anything that doesn't catch on fire. Uh ideally, Yeah, and
you do in your grandfather's room and get a handkerchief
(14:52):
out of his gesture drawer exactly with the initials H monogrammed.
It's old krusty brown snot Yeah. I used to think
that was so gross when I was a little it is.
It's like, oh man, they're blowing their nose and they're
putting it in, they're puttying it away for safekeeping. Gross.
It was a less wasteful generation, though they didn't fill
a plan fills with clinics. That is true, you know,
(15:15):
so it took I pretty much feel like we just
gave a great clinic on lighting. Yeah, shoots some test footage.
Don't dive right in there, you know, monkey around with it.
Oh yeah, you're gonna be really mad or your thing's
gonna look terrible at first, and then get progressively better
as the final final thing goes on. Say yeah, you
want to learn by doing yeah, and yeah, just do
some exercises, all right. We talked a little bit about equipment. Uh,
(15:39):
they are all kinds of cameras you can use. Um.
What I used on the last one, which was super handy,
was a camera that had a remote control so you
could just click off the photos without having to touch
the camera. That is very advisable. Yea. Once you have
the camera set, it's really nice to not touch it
again if you don't have to. Yeah, because again you're
(16:00):
moving the stuff within this world, not the camera, at
least for the shot you're taking. And again, if you
if you have a three second shot, that's what seventy
two photos you need to take from that exact same position. Yeah, right,
So yeah, you don't want that camera to move at
all or else is gonna be some weird jarring and
stuff like that. And the best way to do that
(16:22):
is a remote capture camera. That really helps. Um, if
you have an auto focus slash manual focus, you want
to turn it off the auto focus, make it fixed focus,
manual focus you can. Again, you're just looking for complete control,
uh auto focus little you know, you don't want to
focus on the wrong thing, especially if, like um, your
(16:43):
your many figures coming closer to the camera every time.
That's gonna change that auto focus and you're every every
photo in the frame is gonna look slightly different or
fuzzy or just completely changed from time to time. Not good. Yeah,
you're after consistency, uh, consistency through control pretty much if
(17:03):
you have a digital zoom camera you want to you
want an optical zoom? What is that? Uh? It's basically
I think a digital zoom simulates the image rather than
it being actually so it digitizes the zoom at a
certain point and it's not as high quality now it
(17:24):
looks it always looks crutty in my opinion. So, yeah,
you want to control, so a true zoom basically you
remember the camera, yes you know, yeah, creep that little
thing in like a dolly right, or if you have
your slider you're all set there, so where you can
say it's like a what you basically want to be
like Nikolai cho Chesk or eat a mean of of
(17:46):
your mini films set here? You want like total control
over everything. I thought you were gonna say, like Orson Welles,
like he's to even worse. Okay, Uh so we talked
about bumping the camera. You also don't want to bump
your film set. Yeah, I mean that can really ruin
your day at the end of a long day if
you bump it and all your stuff falls over. So
(18:08):
clamp that stuff down, clamp your set down, glue it down,
do whatever you have to do to keep it as
ruded as possible. Yeah, and don't let anyone anywhere near
it now because it's my lego set and I'm the outdoor.
So we've got some more stuff, some more awesome UM recommendations,
and we're gonna get to it right after this, Chuck,
(18:49):
I really feel like we're helping a lot of people here.
I think so too. So we talked about lighting, we've
talked about the kind of camera equipment you watch or
UM and a lot of well, especially the Brick film
which we'll talk about later, UM, are silent. They're silent films,
which means you don't have to worry about sound. But
there's a lot of them that do have sound, dialogue
(19:10):
all that stuff, UM, and you don't have to worry
about recording that as you go along. Most of the
sound can be recorded in post production, but you want
to have an idea of what is going to be
said where or what what your soundtrack is going to
be like, because you have to figure out how long
each shot needs to be and how many ultimately how
(19:31):
many photos you need to take within a given scene
or else, like the voiceover is still going when you
just change scenes and your your entire family and friends
will laugh at you. When you show them your brick film.
You don't want to be the Edwood of brick films.
He just did not care. He didn't care. It was great.
(19:51):
That movie was great. My favorite or one of my
favorite parts, aside from everything Bill Murray did, was when
tour like bumps the wall in the way in and
they're like, don't you want to shoot that to or
just walked in the wall, He's like, no, I like it.
It's real. Let's use it. Um so expressions and drama.
(20:12):
These little lego folks aren't super expressive in the face,
but they suggested in this article, and it kind of
makes sense. Pop that head off and put on something else,
you know, could be a pink pong ball that you
draw faces on. Well, there there are different many figs
that have um different expressions yea, and so you can
(20:33):
just interchange their heads. Okay, So if someone needs to
look up horrors, put on the horror face. Um. And
then apparently there's companies that will customize facial expressions on
your mini figures. Yeah. And I imagine if you have
some money and you can get that done. That's right. Uh,
And now I want to go not off topic, but
(20:54):
off article and say story, story, story. If you are
going to make a brick film or any film, have
a good story. Just just because it's a two minute
lego brick film, it's gonna stink if it's just you know,
no matter how good it looks, it's not gonna be
fun to watch unless you have a good little story.
(21:16):
So like, write something out that's good and engaging or funny,
and it doesn't have to be super long to have
a little character arc or story arc. Have your guy
chased by something else. Yeah, Like I watched one the
other day and it was it was fun, It was silly.
It was a one lego guy helping the guy next
door do all his chores. Is that the the dandelion? Oh,
(21:37):
I don't know the name of it. But he was,
you know, helping him mo and helping him put on
shutters and doing all this stuff and all the while
like his home was getting beaten up, and it was
just you know, that's all they needed was that one
little joke at the end that they showed the nice
house and then the house in tatters. It's a very
in Randy and brick film. Was it don't help your name,
(22:00):
your own house will fall the pieces if you help
your neighbor well to take care of yourself. The character
was John Galt, so there may be something there. Um
So anyway, yeah, story just uh, I would encourage you
to make something engaging, uh, and then make it look good. Yeah,
all right, that's my soapbox moment. That was great. Thanks,
that was good stuff. All right. So we're onto software, Yeah,
(22:23):
I think so, because, um, you're going to find very
quickly when you have shotos, you need a way to
turn them into a video. They don't just automatically turn
into a video like that. And you can't just do
a flipbook on the internet because you'd have to shoot
that anyway and run it through software eventually. So you
might as well not go to that extra step. Just
(22:43):
get yourself some stop stop motion um animating software, and
there's plenty of them out there. There's some that cost
tons of money, some that are free. Lego has one, yeah,
called Lego movie Maker. Yeah, it's a little app you
can make your own little big encourage the making a
brick films of course, right, So depending on the kind
of software you have there there's some that will automatically
(23:05):
import from your camera. There's some that will. Um, that
has something called onion skinning, which shows like a transparency
of the last shot over the current shot, so you
can make sure everything's going the way you need to say,
if you need to stop and reshoot one of those photos,
you know you can real quick. Um, it's got to
(23:26):
be super helpful to have that. And the whole thing
is gonna put it all in order, animated, and then
it's probably also going to have some sort of whiz
bang features, Like there's one called rhodoscope which makes things glow,
which comes in very handy if you're doing a Star
Wars brick film and you want to make the lightsabers glow.
That's right. Uh. Some of them might have other little
(23:49):
c g I tricks built in, or you can do
some low fi c g I of your own with
a little uh investigating and learning on the YouTube. Uh,
it's not super hard to learn a couple of basic things.
And again, these are brick films. This one that I
watched had some low fi like fire effect, and um,
(24:11):
you know it looked it looked great for what it
was supposed to be. You know, it's not supposed to
be a Hollywood action thriller. It's a brick film, so
it can look kind of campy and corny and it
still works. Did you ever see the Matrix brick film? Now?
It was a good Yeah. I think it's it's not
even like a shot for shot thing of the matrix.
It's like a like in addition to it, it's super
(24:31):
gory and um, it just incredibly well done. It is
like Hollywood action thriller brick film. Nice. You have to
check that out. Well, there's hundreds and hundreds, I would
say thousands, thousands at this point brick films. The first
one that they I watched this one. Actually in the
ninety three, Lars and Einrich Hassing made a little super
(24:54):
eight brick film called Journey to the Moon, and um,
you know it's cute. It's uh, it's actually mother, it's
like kids playing around. But and then it looks pretty good. Yes,
and the especially when you consider that they were doing
a film, yeah, and using like film editing software and
stuff to put this thing together. It's kind of mind
(25:16):
blowing that these two kids put this together and made
basically the first brick film. What's more, since it was
nineteen seventy three, this was five years before the mini
figures came out, so they had to build their own
characters out of legos to good stuff. And then there's
another classic brick film from the late nineteen nineties by
Lindsay Flee and I think the late eighties. What I
(25:38):
say late nineties, Yeah, late eighties is what I'm at,
the Magic Portal, and that was shot on sixteen millimeter film. Uh, yeah,
it looks great. He's a he was a film student
and actually got money from a grant from the Australian
Film Commission, and um, a bunch of people donated lego
sets and it looks really good. Yeah, and it took
(26:00):
them years to do it. It took um, I think
more than a year to just shoot the photos. Yeah.
I mean, now you know why my films were all
twelve seconds long, you know. Yeah, this one's like sixteen
minutes long. Crazy. What are some of the other big ones,
Star Wars, the Han Solo Affair, Yeah, a lot of stars. Yeah.
(26:20):
Have you seen Monty Python on Holy Grow shot for
shot of the Camelot song this, and like, not only
is it shot for shot, it's so great. They got
the lighting correct on every shot. Like it's not like
there's some inside Lego World. It looks like they took
(26:41):
the original Monty Python this minute and fifteen second clip
and like ran it through like a Lego Lego Nader. Wow,
Like they got the lighting perfect. You gotta see it, man,
it's probably the best one. I have to check that out.
And there's some really great ones out here, like again
that Matrix one. I'm amazing. But um, and I have
(27:02):
to say I am a fan of the Magic Portal
now yeah, um, but this Monty Python one is just
it's just mind blowing. And that was by spite your face.
They seem to be the premier brick film studio. Yeah,
they do. Uh, they've done a lot of them. Um.
I was about to remark about the attention to detail
(27:22):
and like the Monty Python thing, but I think that's
by nature what you're getting with these people who make these.
If you don't have an attention, like a scary attention
for detail, you're not gonna be working in stop motion anyway.
So that's why Stuffed By, like Nick Park and Ardment
Animation did Wallace and Grommet and the Creature Comfort series,
they look like the detail is so great because that's
(27:43):
just their deal. California raisins remember then, Oh yeah, good
attention to detail. Yeah. Uh did you see the Lego movie?
I didn't. I didn't either. Hurdle was great, Yeah, I
want to see it. But um, is it a brick
film or not? No? No, no it's not. It was
all c g I s. Brick film doesn't have to
(28:04):
be stopped motion, but typically it should be in at
least like it should be real life Lego figures, not
c g I ones. But um, apparently it had plenty
of homages to brick films in general. Yeah, I didn't
know that. I think that's kind of neat. Yeah. So
the impression I have from researching this is that Lego
as a company is very aware of brick films, obviously
(28:24):
because they have the movie maker app They love it.
They give a ward out for brick films. Um, and
in the Lego movie, it was kind of a tribute
to brick films, a little tip of the old cap.
Old Kirk Christensen would have been like, oh, yeah, Lego
loves this stuff. You know, make a Star Wars one,
(28:44):
make a Ghostbusters one, making Indiana Jones one, bye bye bye,
don't make three Star Wars ones. Who would do that
make a Star Wars and the Ghostbusters and a and
a Planet of the Apes. Yeah exactly? Uh, you got
anything else? Mean? Nope? Brick films again. This is another
(29:05):
entry in our quest to explain absolutely everything there is
on Earth and beyond. So enjoy it, everybody, right not.
If you want to know more about brick films, you
can type that word one word into the search part
how stuff works dot com. But even more than that,
I would encourage you to just type that word into
your favorite search engine and sit back and start watching
brick films. Delightful. They are amazing. Uh. And since I
(29:29):
said your favorite search engine, it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this jokes to her husband. Hey, guys,
to listen to the podcast on revenge this morning as usual.
I really enjoyed. It made me think of a revenge
story in my own life that backfired, uh then became
something pretty amazing. My wife and are big jokesters. When
(29:50):
we found when we were first married, my wife thought
it would be funny to throw a bucket of cold
water over me while I was taking a shower. I
told her that revenge is a dish best served old,
which is, by the way, one of my favorite uh
sayings of all time UH and that my revenge would
come tenfold. So about three years and two children later,
my wife took a pregnancy test, afraid that she was pregnant.
(30:12):
Since our son was three our daughter was nine, my
wife was a bit freaked out at having another kid.
Tests ended up being negative and she was relieved. She
left the pregnancy tests in the back of the toilet
went to grab its center while she was gone. Using
a pen, I was able to make the pregnancy tests
look positive and put it back where she left it.
I never will forget the look of terror on her
(30:32):
face when she eventually saw it came walking to the
room with the test. I immediately started joking with her
about how exciting it is and really playing up the ruse.
I didn't let her dangle too much though, before telling
her the truth. It was a good time and last
for had by all. One month later, she actually was
pregnant and quickly found out that we had twins. So
(30:53):
to this day she playfully blames me for our seven
year old twin boys. It was a great uson in
karma and the aftermathod of revenge isn't always a bad thing.
This world wouldn't be the same without our two little guys.
What a sweet dude. So that Danny DeMarco started off
as kind of like a jerky thing to do, but
(31:14):
it turned out great. Nice Thanks Danny DeMarco from Dallas.
Great name to Danny DeMarco, di Dallas. If you want
to get in touch with this like Danny did, you
can tweek to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
stuff Podcast to how Stuff Works dot com and has
(31:35):
always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.
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