One thing I really like about LEGO customizers is that they take the time to listen to LEGO fans and find out what are their wants and needs. Do you need special minifigures printed for a promotion, corporate event, sporting event, birthday or wedding? They can do it! Would you like to recreate a favorite character from a book or movie? They can do that too! How about if you are a brickfilmer and you want your minifigures to have realistic facial expressions when talking? Yep! That’s also possible! 🙂
The LEGO customizing team at Minifigs.Me is especially good at serving a wide selection of unusual niche request. We have written about them before (see links at the end of this post), and this time I wanted to show you their newest product; a series of custom printed minifigure heads specifically meant to mimic realistic talk in LEGO films. They call them: Phonetic Heads for Animation. Below is a picture of what they look like, and the full description and details from Minifigs.Me.
Creating a professional stop-motion animated film using LEGO parts is a long, rewarding process. Those that graduate out of simplistic films often struggle to capture natural speech with the faces currently available from standard LEGO minifigs. Hours are spent in post processing to create moving lips, necessarily compromising the authentic and genuine charm of stop motion in order to create a better film.
We worked with professional animators to create a set of 12 high grade heads, each with the mouth in the correct shape for a different phonetic sound. By swapping these heads during filming, the time taken in post processing is dramatically reduced. The end result is a more pure film, where it’s apparent the animator went the extra mile.
Each set comes complete with 12 professionally printed, highly durable heads and three printed display blocks to keep them organized. Each head has their corresponding sound printed discretely on the back so that you don’t get them mixed up. Time to treat yourself – get the right tools for the job.
I’m very impressed with these custom printed minifig heads. First of all just the fact that Minifigs.Me took up such an unusual project and got experts involved to create the right shapes for each sound is remarkable enough. Then they took the time to add even more useful features like corresponding letters/sounds printed on the back of the heads, and have printed stands to store the heads. They obviously knew the needs of their target audience very well and thoughtfully worked out the details.
If you are a brickfilmer, and interested in this collection of LEGO minifigure phonetic heads for animation, they are available as a set of 12 heads for £24.99. Minifigs.Me is based in the UK, however they do ship worldwide if you are in another country. Here is the direct link to the heads, and you can also browse their other custom items.
So what do you think? Are you a brickfilmer? Do you think these heads would be useful for your LEGO animations? What other products would make your job easier for making LEGO films? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below! 😉
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