Lego Movie

Technical observations about the computer graphic animation of this movie. It has a very stop motion look.

I grabbed a clip of Cloud Cuckoo Land from youtube and examined it.

Some, but not all, of the motion is only ever other frame. In particular fast moving things and the camera change ever frame, but slower things, like someone walking, hold still for two frames and then have a larger movement, then hold still for two frames again.

Here's twenty frames from the clip made into a slowed down gif:

The original frames have thousands of colors, unlike Legos proper.

If you watch the clip in some software that can go frame-by-frame advance, you can see the mixed jumpy and smooth even better. The click to advance lets you you can slow it down or speed it up as desired, and makes the frame change more obvious.

Lego Knitting Machine

More of a spool knitter than a full knitting machine, but no small accomplishment. Photos and video.

dead link: http://homepage.mac.com/aklego/PhotoAlbum22.html

LEGO Difference Engine

Andrew Carol's Lego Difference Engine is a low tech computer after Babbage's nineteenth century mechanical computer designs. This can evaluate any polynomial of the form ax^2 + bx + c, to three digits of precision, with an effort of a hundred or so turns of the crank.

dead link: http://acarol.woz.org/