This set is one of my favourite LEGO Studios sets I've got. It has lot's of cool stuff in it, and it also includes a LEGO camera and a CD. The only problem with the CD is that it is only for Windows 98. People who use Windows 11 won't be able to use this. This set also includes a dinosaur, a dinosaur's foot, two big lanterns, a vehicle which can make wind if you move the blades, two buildings, a jeep and a baseplate which has a nice earthquake feature. The jeep is very nice and it's so big that you can put in two minifigs. There's also a cat included in this set.

The earthquake feature is awesome as well. If you move the street back, the two buildings will fall on the ground. There're also some nice mini-buildings and vehicles included in this set. The dinosaur foot is a nice addition to this set as well. The foot moves up and down if you push the lever down. The two lanterns which come with this set sviwel full 360° as well. There's also a place where the cameraman and the director can sit. The platform can slide to the left and to the right, and you can also sviwel it at full 360°. It's a great set to have for sure. I also can't complain about the number of minifigs we get in this set.
We also get a book where you can find the instructions for this set and lot's of tips which you can use for your own brickfilm.

All in all, this set is a great set and I would HIGHLY recommend you to get this. You can find this set on eBay and BrickLink for sure. Here is the link where you can check out the full gallery I made for this set on my website: www.klokriecher.de


Videos I made of this set:

Stopmotion

Review

Speed Build

this set is so good 1 car being chased by a dinosaur this is like the ultimant stunt set 2 helpers too but the help movie thing doesen't cover it only the set does but im preety busy in school that i don't get to see this that much but i wish they still sell this set in the lego store some lego studios sets i like and some i don't like this set is one of my favorite sets so far even there some buildings lights oh i like this set.

I had this set as a kid, and it was one of the few BIG sets I ever got. I usually only had smaller box sets, maybe a mid-range spaceship or car but then one day, we stepped into a shop and I saw this big box. It had a camera, it was about making movies...with LEGO. I couldn't believe it, I could make movies with the toys I had at home? Surprisingly enough, my dad picked it off the shelf and took it home with us. I couldn't believe my luck.

Box/Instructions/Manual

I can't speak for the Box as I don't remember what it looked like, I was a kid and most if not all the boxes ended up in the recycle. I can speak for the instructions though, which included set-up for the movie-making software, instructions for the set and it also included a large section on how to make movies known as the Director's Handbook.

The Director's Handbook takes kids through all the basics of movie making: forming the idea, the script, the actors, the setting and uses examples from modern movies to help illustrate any points. It's very easy to read, with clear concise language, even if some words are Americanised (as a young Australian kid, I didn't know what a faucet was). One of the best bits is about making sound effects at home - want to simulate the crackling of fire? Crumple some cellophane. Underwater noises? Blow through a straw into a bottle full of water. That really got a young me thinking about how to work with limited surroundings. It really encourages kids to look at the toys they have, Lego or not, and see what stories emerge from them.

Parts:

There are a lot of parts in this set, some of them quite large and specialised, others small enough to be useful anywhere.

Starting off, there's a special baseplate with two large plastic road pieces, that can be "broken apart" to reveal a lava filled chasm beneath the cracking road. And you can also keep the road crack closed so you could always just have a street. You've got large window pieces, railings, angled blocks, girders, cross-beams, fire, wheels, cars - all in tones of black, grey and white, so not a lot of colour options here. You also get two big fold-out cardboard backdrops/backgrounds that depicted a destroyed city in the daytime (perhaps an apocalypse ravaged city? Post war city?) and then a city during the night-time, with lights and such. They're very cool for cardboard backdrops, and I used them a lot during my Lego movie making endeavours, and even during regular play to enhance the mood of my Lego stories.

And then the one piece that explains the sets high price count: The Lego Studios Digital Camera. It's a digital camera, with studs on the top, bottom and holes for Technic pins on the side. A digital camera, especially a webcam, was pretty expensive around the turn of the 2000s. It's apparently a Logitech camera just in a different housing, but the housing of the camera has studs on the top and bottom, and technic pin/hole connections on the side, so you can construct a mount for it, attach it inside buildings, onto base-plates, and the like. It has a good focus ring and depth settings, it has an immensely long cord to get it from a PC to the Lego on the floor and it has a shutter button on the camera so you can press the button while you play with your Lego, and it saves you running back to the computer all the time.

It also comes with editing software for the Lego Movie Maker program, which explains a bit more of the price. You're also getting specialised editing software built for stop-motion Lego movie making! It's basically Windows Movie Maker but with more options for Lego movies.

I can't really vouch for the software though, I never used because it only works with Windows 98. I've heard it might work with Windows ME and 2000 and you might be able to rig up something with some compatibility testing but it is designed to only work with Windows 98. You can use Windows Movie Maker, but the software apparently has lots of settings designed to work with the camera specifically.

Minifigures

Included in this set are seven minifigures, but I'd argue that only three are really relevant to making a movie. You get a guy in a black jumpsuit (maybe he's a stuntman), a woman in a red jumper/midriff top, a firefighter in the white Res-Q outfit. You then get a director I guess is meant to be Steven Spielberg, a cameraman, an assistant and then a grip with some equipment.

There's a plastic "big fig" T-Rex, in the classic Lego green. It's very cool, not particularly articulated or detailed but imagination can fill in the rest and it's got some studs on the top so you can add more to it. You also get a small white cat figure, which is always a nice addition, and a baby T-Rex figure.

I don't know why they include a director, cameraman, etc as the set is meant to be about making a movie, not about how movies are made. They're not useful as cast members unless you're making some meta-movie about how movies get made, but I'm sure a kid can create a reason, logical or not, as to why they could be in a movie - be creative!

The build process and completed build

I remember the build being easy enough, with no major hiccups or stumbling blocks for a kid. The buildings are a little too easy to build, with lots of large blocks and windows, and end up feeling like much of the 90s juniorised Lego stuff like Town Jr. Even as a kid, I felt like just as the build started to get into a good groove, it ended a bit too soon. I get that the buildings are meant to be “movie sets” and all, but it still felt a bit empty and unfulfilling as a build.

The completed main structure of the build is a city street, with two office/apartment buildings built using the large window pieces and angled blocks. The offices are constructed in such a way that they can fall apart easily, perhaps when the T-Rex comes stomping in? It can collapse easily through use of tiles and plates, and a simple mechanism of a plate/tile being pulled from the back, can make the road opens up to reveal the lava.

For whatever reason, you also end up build two lighting rigs, a fan and some other stuff that you might find in a real movie set. I have an issue with this which I'll explain below. But you also build a sliding track for the camera to sit on, a gearbox to tilt the camera, a red sports car in the classic 4-tile wide style, a big T-Rex foot on a tilting catapult style mechanism to simulate it stomping things (thing Godzilla's foot in the 1990s movie), small mini-skyscapers made up of 2x2 blocks and titles to simulate scale.

I really don't know why they get you making stuff like light towers, fans and the like. If you're making a movie, those things wouldn't be seen. They really should have included different stuff in lieu of these parts, like maybe some vines or something to simulate an overgrown city, or parts to create something like a helicopter or a mini police car to get crushed under the Godzilla/T-Rex foot (I'm aware that the Helicopter was available in set 1351 but I still think they should have given you something else here).

Playability

As a kid, already there is some great potential for play. Going back to that cracked road baseplate, there're multiple ways to interpret that. Maybe an earthquake has created a hole in the earth's crust? A dragon has emerged from slumber under the city? A time machine experiment gone wrong? A Day After Tomorrow style cataclysm?

The T-Rex is a great little figure, and I'd often attach wings on bracket pieces to make a dragon, or attach cannons to back of it to make some kind of riding gun emplacement dragon. The buildings can be used to help fill out a Lego town with some modification, and you get some good parts here to help playability.

But as this set is gauged towards Movie Making, I think it's a bit limited in what you can do with it. As it stands, there's only so much you can do with a street with two buildings and a road that opens up. But then again, it's about providing an idea to a kid about what a movie can look like, how they get made. It provides an idea about scale with the large T-Rex foot and the miniature buildings, about cause and effect with the dinosaur foot and the buildings collapsing.

I suppose the real playability is what you do once you decide to take the camera outside the confines of the movie set, and start telling different stories away from this street. That being said, your playability with the completed set is a bit low.

Overall opinion.

It's a great set for the pieces you get, a lot of which are specialised and can easily be used to create lots of imaginative scenarios for a kid. The T-Rex, the car, the road that splits apart, the cardboard backgrounds, the girders and buildings that collapse. You get engine pieces, minifigures, plates, fire elements, and lots of other goodies. But the majority of the set's high cost comes from the software and the camera. The software doesn't work any more, or you'd need to have a working PC from 1998-2000 around (or a virtual machine, or spend a lot of time getting it to work), and the camera is also pretty outdated now, grainy and washed out, but I suppose it's still a good curiosity piece and enterprising folks could certainly wrangle some good footage out of it.

But my main issue with the set is this: this set is meant to be about making movies, not about how movies get made. Why do we have all this behind the scenes stuff like director minifigures, cameramen, and the small builds like the spotlights and the fans? Even as a kid, I didn't really use these minifigures much because I wasn't making movies about making movies; I wanted some more stuff to help me make some movies. Maybe if they had included a villain minifigure like an evil alien overlord from UFO or a Martian from Life on Mars? Obviously if you own other sets you could put those figures in, but I feel this set should have included a bit more out of the box to get those stories started for a child.

It seems to me the set is a bit confused between depicting movie-making and giving you materials for movie-making. It tries to do both, and has some success, but leaves both sides feeling a bit under-whelmed. It is useful for parts, and has some good figures and unique pieces, with the camera and dinosaur and the like, but as a set it doesn't have a lot of playability or functions.

But if the goal is to get kids interested in making movies, about how movies get made and the work that goes into them, then this is a strong introduction to the craft.

In 2000, The LEGO Group released the "Studios" line, intended to be put to use by those seeking to do LEGO stop motion films. There were some conflicts in the designs, though, that made it not as good as it could be... Still, it has its charm. The big centerpiece of it was this set, the Steven Spielberg Moviemaker Set that came with a camera and editing software. I was lucky enough to get it as a Christmas present.

Box/Instructions

It comes in a black box, with movie production-related images bordering a dramatic shot of the principle scene that can be built with this set. There are three aspects to the instructions: One is instructions on using the editing software, one is on actually building the set as intended, and one is on making movies. All are perfectly readable and clear, no major mistakes.

Parts

Naturally a big set like this comes with plenty of parts. Some of them are fairly special. For one thing, there's a baseplate showing a street broken open with magma beneath the surface. Might call to mind the cheesy disaster movie "Volcano". It's accompanied by two jagged "broken street surface" pieces that can depict the street broken open, or intact. There's pieces to build a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Not as big or detailed (It's your classic unpainted LEGO animal) as the ones from the "Dinosaurs" line of the following year, but cool nonetheless. There's also a kitty and a baby rex. There's some shortcut building pieces for modern office-type buildings too, as well as a couple of girders. And then there's the camera. Fairly decent for its time, comparable to the stuff like the Logitech Quick-Cam from the same time period. Digital cameras like that cost $100 or more at the time, so that's a huge chunk of the set's price explained right there. There's also the CD with the editing software. It's a bit clunky by today's standards, but for the time this thing came out it was alright aside from the awkward saving mechanism and was certainly far more advanced than Windows "Even today you still can't manipulate framerate in me" Movie Maker. Video editing software also was not exactly cheap at the time the set came out. The real issue with it is that it doesn't get along with anything other than Windows 98 and maybe ME, and Windows 98 was already on the way on out by the time the set was released, hence why I think it started development in 97 or 98 and then got delayed in release for some reason. Finally, there's two big cardboard backdrops. One shows a ravaged city during daylight, the other showing a big city at night. So all in all, excellent value for money. The only reason I knocked a point off.. well, you'll see.

Minifigures

Here's one area that makes me think there were design conflicts in the Studios theme. You get seven of them. One is a female character who is Totally Not Sarah Harding We Swear, one is a Res-Q Firefighter, one is a leather-suited generic driver who's labeled as a stuntman, one's a director who looks like Steven Spielberg, one's a cameraman who recycles the face Doc from Rock Raiders, one's an assistant, and one's a grip. All have a symbol of a slate on their back, generally stating their position. The first three I mentioned are great, able to be used for a variety of roles. But the last four... aside from having their heads swapped onto other figures, they're not very useful as cast members in a brickfilm. It seems to show conflicting design goals: One being to create sets that can be used for moviemaking, one being to create sets that depict moviemaking.

The build

The build is fairly straightforward. The main part of it is the city street. The buildings are very juniorized, but then they're meant as set dressing more than anything else. The most interesting part of the build here is the rig that the camera gets mounted on. The other parts are even simpler to build.

The completed model

You have a city street with a road surface that can be pulled open and a couple of buildings that can be collapsed and... spotlights that don't actually do anything but at least the parts can be used for stuff... and a rig for the camera that has a sliding track and can be tilted up and down via a gearbox, accompanied by a red convertible somewhat resembling the one driven by Ian Malcolm and Sarah Harding in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" (which is no coincidence, considering the actress minifig's resemblance, the adult and baby T. Rex, the night-time city backdrop...), a couple of rows of flames and a fire extinguisher to go with the firefighter, a big stompy T. Rex foot, a pair of small-scale skyscrapers accompanied by cars made of jumper plates and 1x1 tiles, ...and a big studio blower fan that's useless like the spotlights and isn't as good a parts mine. The fan and the spotlights are also things that show that design conflict and why I knocked a point from the parts - some more useful stuff for setbuilding like plants or something would have been appreciated.

Overall opinion

So yeah, this set has its flaws and you'd need a Windows 98 box or a virtual machine install of Windows 98 to run the software and the camera's dated nowadays. But it still supplies plenty of useful tools for creating LEGO stop-motion films and can even be adapted to help build a larger city. The camera can be mounted on studs or Technic pins... There's a lot of options with it. It has a good manual focus adjust, a very long cord so that you can get all kinds of angles and carry it all over the room, and actually has a shutter button so that you don't have to stretch your arm to click a button on the computer, or hit the mouse with a stick, or do shenanigans to wedge the camera in place while you go click... It's not as good as it could have been, but it could have been worse.

Also, it has a T. Rex in it :P

I bought this at a bargin warehouse, the kind of place where you dont expect a LEGO box to have all its pieces. I got a real deal for this set.

Pros

• Camera
• Well written book for kids to learn about movie making.
• Software for kids to make movies
• 442 Pieces
• 7 Minifigs
• Base plates
• Dino figure

Cons

• Ages 8-14
• Complicated build

I found this set to be better for the camera and software more that the pieces it has, but there is still a good quantity of pieces.