How Not To Make A Movie - Josh

When we were kids, my brothers and I liked playing with Legos. I mean, really really liked playing with Legos. Our parents would buy us the little plastic bricks any time gift-giving was in order, and once we got tired of playing with them as the sets they came in, we'd take them completely apart and build our own, much cooler Lego creations. If you've ever owned Legos, I'm sure you can relate.

My brother Gideon and I were the Lego-combining masters of the household, though I have to admit he was always better at it than I was. This may be because he was more aggressive than I and thus held a monopoly on all the useful, color-coordinated pieces, leaving me with his leftover rejects. So while his would turn out something like this:

Mine would look something closer to this:

Eventually we collected enough Star Wars-themed sets to have enough gray pieces to go around, but for a while, my ships would look like they'd come from the Happy Rainbow squadron, which is not all that impressive or helpful in space battles.

At some point we created a group of five heroes collectively known as the Super Squad. Gideon had a three-part ship that included a small fighter, a slightly bigger cruiser, and a docking station that resembled a pair of legs. Put together, the thing looked like a ten-inch person. I had my own similar three-part configuration, only slightly smaller and less cool-looking because I was still using leftover blocks. Our sister, who we somehow roped into playing space wars with us, had a little scout ship we build for her. It was pretty impressive for a bunch of amateur Lego artists.

After their first few adventures, we felt we needed to take it to the next level. After thinking about it for a good five minutes, we cane up with the brilliant idea of making a Super Squad movie. However, this involved asking our dad for permission to use his camera. He reluctantly agreed on the condition that only I or my brother use it. Why? Becaue it was a VHS camera. They're slightly less bulky than those cameras news teams have. But only slightly.

Next we had to write the script and assign parts, which went something like this:

Gideon: “I want to be Luke.” (his main hero)

Me: “Okay, I'll be everyone else.”

Oh yeah. You know how I said there were five of them? Well, for the movie version, we decided to introduce about 40 new 'good guys' whose main purpose was to look cool while the five main characters did all the actual work. I'm not sure why we thought that was a good idea. I mean, there were only three of us, and one of us had to hold the camera. Did we think they were going to fly themselves?

Now, remember how I said my brother would use all the best pieces for his ships? Remember how mine would be cobbled together with the leftovers? Now, imagine that we have about forty ships build like that, just for the good guy team. By now we've used up everything even halfway decent. Now try to imagine what the bad guy ships might have looked like.

That's not really an exaggeration, either. Oftentimes the bad guy ships were so fragile they would break on lift-off. At one point, one of the bad guy bosses tries to fight the good guy boss's space ship with a pirate pistol.

The sad thing is, I think the pirate pistol won. Apparently we didn't bother with little details like physics and logic.

Also, with a complete lack of scripted lines, we had to ad lib the entire ten-minute movie. This led to little jewels such as, “We should call ourselves the Super Duper Squad!” and “I shot – YOU CAN'T FLY!” Back then, I had a thing for alliterations, so when the bad guys made their entrance, I gave the incredible non-threatening name, “The Imposter Posse,” which isn't even an alliteration.

Needless to say, the movie wasn't quite as spectacular as we thought it would be. 

Years later, I found out that this was the real reason my dad was reluctant to let us use the camera. But hey, we had a ton of fun doing it. So much fun, in fact, that we made eleven of them. I can only imagine what my dad went through has he mourned the loss of valuable video tape, but I like to think that he consoled himself with the thought that he was a good father letting his kids explore their talents.

Yeah...

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Oh, by the way, all the cool 3D spaceship art was made by someone else, not me. I only do paint.

The first ship was made by Joel Carlo (http://www.joelcarlo.net/ for his website, image found here: http://www.templates.com/blog/striking-spaceship-squadron/)

The giant Lego Star Destroyer was found here: http://www.galaxybricks.com/ultimate/star-destroyer-lego.php

And finally, the space battle image comes from: http://www.wallpaperpimper.com/wallpaper/download-wallpaper-Space_Battle-size-1024x768-id-14668.htm