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Approx. 7 min read
Award season doesn’t end in March. This year, to coincide with 2026’s Brickfilm Day festival, the Brickfilmer’s Guild announced the winners of their 2025 film festival and awarded me with Best Story and Screenplay. This was for my film “Continue the Story: June 2025”, which as the name suggests, was part of a collaborative project. Each month, an animator creates their own instalment of a 12-part series. The series is high fantasy, following the adventures of a reluctant hero Sir Baldwin and his Wizard guide as they strive to save their kingdom from the forces of evil.
My approach for the film was to obviously follow on from the previous instalments, but also make it work as a standalone story with its own 3-act structure. This was my first fantasy film since my very first LEGO animated project The Chronicles of Pandrudica back in 2015, so I was very excited to see what I could pull off with all the experience I had gained since then. I strove to make this the most visually ambitious project I had ever created, taking lots of inspiration from how I envisioned the Discworld series from reading some of the books, as well as taking thematic inspiration from The Lord of the Rings, Avatar: The Last Airbender and the Legend of Zelda videogame series. A lot of the plot elements of the film were also taken from a scrapped follow-up to The Chronicles of Pandrudica.
This film rekindled my love for the fantasy genre in many ways, as I had become disillusioned with many of the tropes that I feel plague even much of the fantasy stories I enjoy; namely the trope of the ‘chosen one’, who is unique to everyone else and is destined to save the world. Beyond being just a cliché, I also fundamentally take issue with this narrative when viewed from a real-world context; idle worship always leads to unhealthy views of individuals and places people on pedestals. Positive change requires the work of many people coming together for a shared cause, not the work of one person and people don’t have to be significantly more special or powerful than anyone else to make a real difference. I wanted to tell a story that reflected that and subvert the typical fantasy narrative of the ‘chosen one’. The way Baldwin had been written up to this point (a clueless everyman who has been told to save the world without any explanation as to how), felt fitting for this kind of story.
Work on the film began in May and I intended to finish work on the film before going away in mid-June. As things were starting to take shape, I soon realised how long this project was actually going to take, with the added complication that what was originally supposed to be a 10-minute film was going to be closer to 15-minutes. To try to keep up with the looming deadline, I resorted to taking my LEGO and equipment with me on a caravan trip away with my family and animating a bunch of sequences in the evenings. The Library interior was built and animated at the caravan. Animating on the final day of our caravan trip, I soon realised I wasn’t going to finish all library sequences before going back home; it was 4am and we were set to leave the caravan in 5 hours. I flattened the walls of the set in a plastic envelope and carefully packed additional parts of the set in my plastic LEGO boxes, so I could reassemble the set afterwards. Watching back now, knowing that the library scenes cut from one shot to another 250 miles apart from each other, will always get a kick out of me, but I’m really happy that you wouldn’t have been able to tell.
Even with continuing to animate while away, the project became way too big to complete before going abroad in June 2025 and so, I would spend many sleepless nights towards the latter half of June 2025 finishing the film before the month ended. I would eventually release the film with mere hours left of June. I was very happy with how it came together, although I did have to make compromises with the sound mix.
I am incredibly honoured to have been awarded Best Story and Screenplay by the Brickfilmer’s Guild and I’m happy that the film’s strengths have gone on to be appreciated, even if it needs some finishing tweaks. I’m really proud of the film and I like to think the message and themes of the film will resonate with a lot of people; this is why I intend to rerelease the film as a fully standalone project, with a fully mixed sound edit and some additional context at the beginning, so the viewers have all the context needed to follow film on its own. Continue The Story: June 2025 is also not the catchiest title, so I will want to give the rerelease a new name.
In September, I aim to start a run of film screenings of the new updated release of the film in and around Cardiff, before releasing it to my YouTube channel later in the year. If you want to get the opportunity to see the new edit of the film for the first time in 4k before anyone else, stay tuned, as I will be sharing these details in the coming weeks!
Thanks for reading. If you would like to keep up to date on when I will be posting these, I will be sharing them to my various social media accounts and on the monthly newsletter.