The Magic Portal

The Magic Portal is a 16-minute stop-motion film created by Lindsay Fleay in 1985. It is the second known brickfilm ever made (the first being "En rejse til månen", made in 1973), and the first known brickfilm to feature minifigures.
History
Pre-production of the film started when Fleay, an Australian, had graduated from high school in 1985. He obtained government funding for the project. Production relied on donated LEGO parts and equipment borrowed from Curtin University, where he was enrolled. Shooting took 9-12 months, and audio editing and mixing took another two and a half years.
The film was broadcast six times on SBS's Eat Carpet, and locally distributed. Unfortunately, showings at more prominent film festivals were cancelled due to legal hostilities with LEGO.
Plot
The film starts with a shot of a spaceship flying through space. El (Larry in storyboard), a crew member, walks through the corridors of the ship when he discovers the eponymous magic portal, a rectangular arch flashing with various colors. Entering the portal, he is transported into a world of passageways. Some LEGO creatures appear and build a small car for him to drive through the world of passages. He then has a close encounter with a two-headed monster who chases him through the various paths of the mysterious world. After El's car has a bump from a crossing train, the car falls apart. El finds another portal, and nearly gets eaten by the monster, who ends up in the real world while chasing a leftover tyre from the devoured car and attacks Lindsay Fleay.
El reports his experiences to Captain Paranoia, but neither him nor his shipmate Pee believes him. However, Captain Paranoia finds another Portal, which takes him to a "white expanse" world, where a plasticine creature messes around with him, making him very annoyed and then flushs him out of the white coloured world. The plasticine creature then goes back through the portal Captain Paranoia came through.
The Captain then finds his way back to the ship, and tells El and Pee about what happened in the Portal. El, Pee, Captain Paranoia and the Plasticine creature, go through the Portal, and find themselves in the real world, and get chased by liquid paper daleks. The four escape the liquid paper daleks, which are scared off by the two-headed monster that El had an encounter with earlier, in a shoe car. The monster is in pursuit of the shoe car, causing the car to destroy the set Lindsay Fleay was filming, and the monster knocks over the camera. As the set is rebuilt, El walks through the ship corridors again. The film ends as the screen goes through the Portal.
Impact
The Magic Portal is a forerunner to today's brickfilms, which range from the stop-motion style employed chiefly in The Magic Portal to CGI and live-action variants.
Today The Magic Portal is available on the Internet, where most of today's brickfilms are available through sites like YouTube.

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See Also

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