» Another week, another webseries contest on Tongal

In a move that comes completely out of left field, LEGO and Fox Sports have joined forces to align Cleatus, the Fox Sports robotic football mascot, with LEGO Hero Factory. Now, I’m all for wacky mash-ups:

Remember when the Jetsons traveled back to Bedrock in Elroy’s time machine as uninvited guests to the big Flintsone/Rubbel family camping trip? How about when Josie and the Pussycats linked up with the Scooby Doobies in the Laff-A-Lympics?

But, what’s really interesting about this contest is that they’re going long with the concept:

The Pilot that LEGO and Fox like the best will be ordered to a mini series of an additional 3 episodes (4 in total) which you’ll be required to delivered as laid out under the Project Details. If Sponsor orders your Pilot to series, they will retain the option to order an additional 4 episode, 120 second per episode “Season 2 by July 1, 2013” at the pre-negotiated rate of $30,000. Or, they may elect to order single episodes at the rate of $10,000 per episode.

Let’s just hope whoever wins this really knocks it out of the park. The Hero Factory characters have enormous potential for expressive animation because of their ball joints (for the best example of what is possible, see the Bionicle fan-film “The Legend of Ignaqua“), but the budget is kind of low-balled for a stop-motion animation series. Was that enough sports puns for you?

David Pagano says:

August 31, 2012 at 12:38 am

Not only is the budget weird, but the project as a whole could end up being double the running time — 8 episodes at 2 minutes each, or 16 minutes of animation total — with a deadline of July 1, 2013. That’s 16 minutes of animation in 10 months. Are they serious?

Even the 4 episode order has a super tough deadline, with around one month per 2-minute episode. All I can say is, good luck to whomever ends up winning this contest!

BackyardLegos says:

October 3, 2012 at 7:58 pm

Correct me if I’m wrong, but something seems weird about how TLG views brickfilms. I can’t quite put a definition to it, but it seems like at times they greatly encourage the use of LEGO for animation, such as these Tongal contests, and sometimes to be almost against people spending a ton of money on their product for a hobby, not to mention all the free advertising on YouTube. And again, I may be off base here, but with what they’re asking for from the winner, they don’t seem all to aware of what goes into these magical animations that pop up on the internet, despite having worked with animators like David Pagano. Something has just always seemed strange to me, I don’t know what it is.

David Pickett says:

October 4, 2012 at 12:00 am

One to keep in mind when talking about TLG is that it’s a big company with lots of different departments, so when it does things that seem contradictory it might be because they are completely separate initiatives run by different people. I think they’re experimenting with a lot of things. What ever else they’ve done positive or negative, we have to give them due credit for the Super Hero Movie Maker App which is a huge boon for first-time animators.