The River: atmospherically riveting short film

Is an emotively entertaining short piece of superb stop-motion animation that firmly cements a new genre of film making into the mainstream of media art; created with the geeky favored toy box of Lego bricks, together with some cleverly orchestrated handmade visual and software effects.

Although captured on a Nikon D40x and authored in Final Cut Pro, the technical skill used to display large amounts of artwork is in the use value of treating Legos like clay.

The River won the best cinematography category of the bricks in motion 2009 star competition in which Nikolas Jaegar provides us with an alluring example of what can be achieved using technically astute Diy effects.

The underlying theme bears some semblance of a story, requisite with the history of the American Civil War, however bear in mind though The River has got an existential kick to it.

"A lot of people have asked me about the plot. I'll say that some parts are more clear than others, and that's really my intention. I don't want it to be a film where you reach the ending and go "oh, THAT's what was going on", not at all."



Both the film and music is by Nikolas Jaeger, with voices from Leonardo Liccini, Erik Wiedenmann and David Wardell, and Civil War sound effects provided by Phil Sepulveda.