How to Make a LEGO-Style AI Short Film

A short built entirely out of plastic: a minifigure of your own face, a brick-built stage, a crowd of moulded heads, and a scene that runs past the length of any single generation.

The stills came out of that project and the face in them started as one photograph. The screenshots come from the walkthrough it was built in, which sets the interface in its own type and writes notes over it — so where a label in a picture and the text below it disagree, the text is the one describing your screen.

A new project asks what it should look like. In every other genre you can answer it later. Here you cannot, and the reason is worth understanding rather than memorising.

The style you set is injected invisibly at the top of the final prompt for every scene in the project — and that includes the generation that turns your photo into an actor. Set it first and the actor is *born* as a minifigure. Set it after, and you have a photoreal person that every brick-world prompt then has to argue with.

So: style first, face second. The order is the whole trick.

The modal takes reference images and/or a description, and it is explicit that images alone are enough. For this style, that is not a convenience — it is the better answer.

Plastic is extremely hard to write and extremely easy to show. A couple of frames of brick-built sets carry the sheen, the stud spacing, the moulded hand shape and the macro falloff in one pass, and none of those survive being turned into adjectives. Drop the images in, and the button reads Analyzing images… while it works out what you handed it.

If you want to write it as well, this is the description that produced everything on this page:

LEGO minifigure world — glossy ABS plastic, brick-built sets, visible studs, toy-macro lighting, shallow depth of field, playful cinematic moments.

Now the actor. In the Cast panel, Create actor opens the dialog with two ways in; take Upload a face and give it one clear, front-facing photo.

You are not asking for a plastic version of the picture. You are asking for an actor in a project whose style already says plastic, which is why the same upload that gives you a person in any other project gives you a minifigure here.

What comes back is a full character sheet: front, side, back, and a close portrait. This is the reference every later scene is measured against.

Read it as a toy, not as a portrait. The things that carry a brick character across shots are the ones a photograph never showed — the moulded hair piece from behind, the printed torso, the chain, the legs. If the back of the head is wrong here it is wrong in every shot where your character walks away, and rebuilding now costs one generation.

An empty project says No scenes yet and tells you to direct your first scene with the + button or the Director Board.

In the scene bar — the one that opens from the + button — @mention your actor so the cast chip goes in, then write what happens — nothing about plastic, nothing about studs, nothing about the lighting. All of that is already being injected above your line. Repeating it here only fights the style you set.

The scene on this page was one sentence:

@GUEDJ shreds a red keytar on stage, then stage-dives into the crowd.

The scene lands in the preview and drops onto the timeline as a clip you can play and trim.

Judge it against the character sheet, not against the prompt. Is that the same minifigure? Do the hands still read as moulded C-shapes rather than fingers? Is the set built from the same parts as the characters? Keep what holds and regenerate what does not.

This is where an eight-second gag becomes a thirty-six-second scene — those are this build's own numbers, off the transport readout in the shot below — and it is worth being precise about how, because the shortcut version of this claim is wrong.

One generation is capped. Fast and Quality render up to 15 seconds; Performance up to 30. Nothing produces a minute in a single pass.

What gets you past that is the Director Board: drag a clip's edge and a hatched zone opens with a running duration, and letting go hands that length to a new generation that continues from the previous shot's last frame. Each stretch pre-fills up to 15 seconds, so a long timeline is a chain of continuations — which is also why the character and the set survive across it, because every link is seeded by the frame before it.

Every style trades one set of problems for another, and this one trades unusually well.

Forgiven: faces. A minifigure face is a printed decal that does not emote, so the uncanny-valley problem this medium usually has simply does not arise. Skin, hair and eyes — three of the hardest things to generate — are moulded plastic here.

Exposed: hands and scale. Brick hands are a specific moulded shape and a render that gives them fingers is instantly wrong. Stud spacing has to stay consistent between shots or the world changes size. And crowds of minifigures drift the same way crowds of people do.

So: write close, keep the cast small, and let the sets be built rather than sculpted.

Assemble the approved clips, trim hard, and lean into what the medium already looks like: short shots, clear staging, a joke or a beat per cut.

Brick films are funny because they are *small* — the pleasure is recognising something enormous rendered in a toy. Ending a shot a beat early is what keeps that feeling. Hold too long and the audience stops seeing a toy and starts inspecting a render.