Stuff You Should Know - How Brickfilm Works

Episode Date: July 9, 2015

What began as a pair of teens who made a film for their grandparents has exploded into its own art form. Learn all about how stop-motion Lego films are made. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry and this is Stuff You Should Know. How's it going? It's going great, sir. How are you? I'm good. Do you remember our Lego episode?

I do. That is a great episode, classic, that I highly recommend people listen to. It's where the name Old Kirk Christensen came up. As soon as I saw that name, it just flashed me back. Only great name, O-L-E, I think we should go by Old Josh Clark and Old Chuck Bryant. That's definitely how it goes. Well, I'll bet you something, Chuckers. Back in 1932, when Old Kirk Christensen founded Lego in Bill and Denmark, Billand, when she

says the name? Yeah, you mean when he founded Automatic Binding Bricks? Right. He didn't call him Lego at first. No. Lego's definitely more grabby. Yeah. Well, he came up with Lego apparently.

And I remember us debating this or not, but so I looked around. And this is what I see everywhere, including on the Lego site. That Lego is two words, leggut, which means play well. G-O-D-T. But Lego also means I put together in Latin, I believe. Oh, yeah? Yep. Well, anyway, when he was coming up with this, I'll bet he never thought these are going

to be used to make hundreds and thousands of short stop motion films that are going to delight millions of people around the world one day. Probably never thought about that. No, but they do. I wonder what old Kirk thought when he stepped on one with his bare feet. He thought, yeah. He said, man, this is going to tick off a lot of parents for the next 3,000 years. Yeah.

It's not fun. So Chuck, I don't know if you caught it or not. I just made a reference to brick films. Yeah. Did you catch the reference? I did. Stop motion. Well, I guess animation really is what it comes down to.

That's exactly what it is. One of the earliest forms of animation, because all it involves is moving something, taking a photo of it, moving it just a little bit more, taking another picture and doing that until you want to kill yourself. Pretty much. And then that's stop motion animation. Yeah. Requires a lot of patience.

I've made a few of them myself, and when I say a few of them, I mean one complete one with my brother, with G.I. I remember. With the super eight. I made about probably 12 seconds of one with Star Wars figures in my 20s. And then about 30 seconds of one with Clay. I built a little theater box set and everything. Nice.

Made a guy look great out of Sculpey. And I think he got out of bed, went over to his dresser, got a shirt, and went and exited the door, and then I was like, I'm done. I bet it took so long. The rest of his day that you had the script for is just, no. Yeah. It looked good though, and I was proud of it, but it's just not for me. Well, you need to post those on YouTube, man.

They're on VHS somewhere. I could dig these things up. You need to get them on the YouTube. Yeah. The world can't access your VHS tapes. So what do I just get the VHS tape and I just bang it on my laptop and it gets on YouTube? Yep. Okay.

As long as there's a black monolith in the background behind you, it'll work. All right, I'll have to try that. So you never use Legos though? Never use Legos, but I do think Legos are made for this kind of thing because not only do they click into place, which is key because you don't want stuff moving around, but these days there are all kinds of pre-packaged Lego sets that are just little film sets waiting to be made into movies. Yeah.

I mean, that's probably the reason why it took off so much. I'm sure. Because Lego keeps building these sets that are like Harry Potter sets or Star Wars sets or Marvel Superhero sets. Yeah. And then there's Lego competitors like Mega Blocks that has licenses for the Halo video game series or Hello Kitty or Barbie, right? Call of Duty.

Yeah, so all you have to do is get one of these packages, one of these sets and all of a sudden you have a movie set if you have a lot of patience, a camera of any sort really as we'll see and something to animate it with basically a light source. Sure. Not a lot of stuff. You can get, when I was doing it, it was about as bare bones as it got. It was working on a tabletop with a couple of, you know, the little clip on aluminum lights.

You get it at the hardware store. You can use those. What are those? Work floods. Yeah. Just little work lights. They get hot. They sure do.

And I didn't have any, you know, I had a tripod and a camera because you want to keep things super still. You definitely need a tripod. Definitely need a tripod. Or if you are fancy or have friends that are fancy and have a slider, you know, it's basically like a little mini dolly that your camera can sit on and they're, you know, three to four feet long. And then you can do little dolly moves and camera moves on your slider and keep it nice

and straight, or if you're, uh, have some ingenuity, which you probably do if you're making a brick film, you can make your own little skateboard dolly out of skateboard wheels and PVC pipe. Oh yeah. You just make a little track and then, um, attach like, you know, you basically, you can, there's a lot of ways to do it, but like a baseboard to sit the camera on with, uh, track wheels to guide along the PVC. Right.

Pretty neat. So, um, what we're talking about specifically are brick films and one of the, there aren't a lot of requirements to make a brick film, aside from what you're saying, but one of them is that Legos have to kind of feature prominently. Most brick films are stop motion. Yeah. And one of the things in addition to having like Harry Potter sets or outer space sets or all these different sets that are like mini movie sets, right?

Right out of the box, um, are the mini figures. Yeah. Yeah. Those are your actors typically. Yeah. They didn't come along till the late seventies. Yeah. 1978.

And then now I think they're the largest population on the planet. Oh, really? Yeah. Remember, there's like four billion of them or something like that. I know they made more tires than anyone else. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Right.

Yeah. I came along, my Lego experience was pre, uh, figure. So we had to, we had to make our own little men and women out of smaller Legos. In the snow, upways, uphill both ways. These make sense. They look cooler. Yeah. So most brick films are stop motion.

Some people actually film the, the, um, Lego figures and characters moving. Yeah. That's tough. I would guess so. I would think it's not quite as time consuming though. I don't even, wire work and stuff. I bet it's frustrating. Yeah.

But I mean, if you have like all of your Lego figures on roller skates or something, you just kind of drag them along. Sure. You don't have to take picture, picture, picture. You can film them moving. Yeah. With stop motion, it's very, it's much, it's the opposite. Basically, it's like you said, you, you set up your, your, your shot.

You take a photo of it and then you move the person a little bit. Like if they're walking, you would move their arm, one of their arms down, another one up and one leg out a little bit and the other one back a little bit. And then take that picture and so on and so on. And what you're ultimately doing is recreating motion. Right. Right. Using inanimate objects.

And the way you recreate motion is by the frames per second, which is a film speed. And film shoots at, or plays, I should say, at 24 frames per second, which means that every second of film you see, you're actually being shown 24 still photographs in succession. Yeah. Every second of film video is 30 frames per second and there are, there are variations on all this to achieve different looks, you know, but if you were just doing the math, if you want to do a stop motion film, a five minute stop motion film at 24 FPS frames per second would be 7,200 individual photographs.

Right. That's for five minutes. Five, five minute film means you have to take that many photographs in order and in between photographs, you can't just sit there and take 7,200 photographs or else you're just going to have 7,200 of the same pictures. Sure. Is there 7,200 slightly different pictures where one is slightly different from the last? Yes.

One way you can cheat that a little bit is if you just double it up and you use two frames for each move. Right. So you would take 12 pictures for a second of video, right? Well, and then just use them twice and that would make it a 24 second, 24 frames per second. Yeah. It's going to look a little more herky-jerky, but the nature of the brick film is a little

herky-jerky anyway because of the way they move and the range of motion on the little figures. So it's not like if you took completely bendable action figures, you know, you can get a lot more smooth detailed moves. Yeah, people aren't expecting your Lego thing to move completely seamlessly. That's not how Legos move. They've got, I think, four points of movement. Do they?

Yeah, their shoulders and their hips. Okay, so they don't have like elbows or knees? No. Okay. And then technically you can say their head has a range of motion. So five. Yeah. You just acted out a Lego's movement.

Yeah. It was very adorable, which people can see this stuff, Josh. Thanks, man. All right. Well, let's take a little break here and get back to some lighting techniques right after this. Hey, friends. When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an

Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment

I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I

thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Josh, you've got your Ghostbusters Lego brand kit. You want to make a sequel to Ghostbusters because Ghostbusters 2 was horrible? Not true. Did you like it? Sure. If it was a Ghostbusters movie, it was great. So you want to make Ghostbusters 3 because you thought 2 was so good, it deserved its own sequel.

And you want to get some lights. I already said you can go cheap and just get those little aluminum lights. If you really want to get serious, you can rent lights from a camera house. Or you can go to your friend, Scott's, be like, I know you have some lights. Yeah, or here at House of Works, we have the use of lights. Yeah, if you're making a brick film drop by, we'll lend you some lights. No, don't do that. Basically lighting is going to do a few things.

It's going to light up your set so people can see it, A. And B, it can help you set a mood for sure, like whether it's day or night or noir or sunny, like a bright sunny day. And what you're really looking to do, though, is have complete control of your lighting because one thing that can really thwart your brick film is any change in lighting. You won't notice it. You'll just take your little picture and then you'll see flickering going on when you play it back.

And that's because someone turned on a light in the other room next to you and you didn't notice it. So you want to black out all the curtains, just get in a room where you have complete control over the lighting. Yeah, that's the same reason why you don't want to shoot a brick film or any kind of stop motion outdoors. Because the sun changes its lighting at a fairly regular rate, faster than you can shoot and move.

So yeah, you want to totally be able to control lighting. So once you have your lighting under total control, you want to use usually about three lights at least. Put on your black turtleneck. Yeah, or like your black Rootsuit or something like that, even better, and don't let anybody see it like that because they're going to be like, you're a total weirdo locked away in this room with no windows wearing a black Rootsuit playing with your Lego minifig. Then you'd say, no, I'm a filmmaker.

Brick filmmaker. And they would just back out of the room slowly. So you use one light for backlighting. Use that behind the thing, behind your shot. You have key lighting, which is the front. And then you also want to have some sort of bounce. And you can basically replace that third light source with even just like a white sheet of paper or something to reflect light off that's very mobile so you can direct it wherever

you need it. And the whole point of this is to light normally, but also to chase off shadows. Yeah. If you've never lit anything, you're going to be frustrated at first because your Lego characters are going to have like two different shadows going in two different directions. And the first thing you're going to think is, well, that doesn't look like real life. So you can do two things. You can experiment around with your fill lights until you get rid of your shadows.

Or you can get a book or look on the internet, just some very basic lighting techniques. Yeah. It's not super complicated. It's tough to get really good at it. Right. It's not necessarily intuitive. No. Where you're like, oh, this guy looks like a soccer player in a night game.

He's got four shadows everywhere. Yeah, exactly. So how do I get rid of that? Oh, it's just bounce. I would say this would be one of those times when it's best to just rely on the wisdom of others who've come before and put that wisdom on the internet. Yeah, exactly. The lights too, you're going to want to diffuse it.

It's probably going to be way too harsh coming directly off the bulb. So you can use like wax paper or a handkerchief or anything that doesn't catch on fire, ideally. Yeah. You go into your grandfather's room and get a handkerchief out of his gesture drawer. Exactly. With the initials monogrammed, it's an old crusty brown snot. Yeah. I used to think that was so gross when I was little.

It is. It's like, oh man, they're blowing their nose and they're putting it in their pocket. Putting it away for safekeeping basically. Yeah. It's gross. It was a less wasteful generation though. They didn't fill up landfills with Kleenex. That is true.

You know? I pretty much feel like we just gave a great clinic on lighting. Yeah. Shoot some test footage. Don't dive right in there. You know? Monkey around with it. Oh yeah.

You're going to be really mad. Are your things going to look terrible at first and then get progressively better as the final thing goes on? So yeah. You want to learn by doing. Yeah. And yeah. Just do some exercises.

All right. We talked a little bit about equipment. There are all kinds of cameras you can use. What I used on the last one, which was super handy, was a camera that had a remote control. So you could just click off the photos without having to touch the camera. That is very advisable. Yeah. Once you have that camera set, it's really nice to not touch it again if you don't have

to. Yeah. Because again, you're moving the stuff within this world, not the camera, at least for the shot you're taking. Right. And again, if you have a three second shot, that's what 72 photos you need to take from that exact same position. Yeah.

Right? So yeah, you don't want that camera to move at all or else there's going to be some weird jarring and stuff like that. And the best way to do that is a remote capture camera. Yeah. That really helps. If you have an autofocus slash manual focus, you want to turn it off the autofocus. Make it fixed focus, manual focus.

And again, you're just looking for complete control, autofocus, you know, you don't want it to focus on the wrong thing. Especially if your minifigure is coming closer to the camera every time, that's going to change that autofocus and every photo in the frame is going to look slightly different or fuzzy or just completely change from time to time. Not good. Yeah. You're after consistency.

Consistency through control pretty much. If you have a digital zoom camera, you want to, you want an optical zoom. What is that? It's basically, I think a digital zoom simulates the image rather than it being a true image. Oh, then it actually, I got you. So it digitizes the zoom at a certain point. And it's not as high a quality. No, it looks, it always looks cruddy.

Gotcha. In my opinion. So yeah, you want to control. So a true zoom. Basically, you want to be... Or move the camera. Yes. You know?

Yeah. Creep that little thing in like a dolly. Right. Or if you have your slider, you're all set. There you go. So what are you going to say? It's like a what? You basically want to be like Nikolai Chachescu or Idi Amin of your mini film set here.

You want like total control over everything. I thought you were going to say like Orson Welles, like he's off tour. Even worse. Okay. So we talked about bumping the camera, you also don't want to bump your film set. Yeah. I mean, that can really ruin your day at the end of a long day if you bump it and all your stuff falls over.

So clamp that stuff down, clamp your set down, glue it down, do whatever you have to do. Yeah. To keep it as rooted as possible. Yeah. And don't let anyone anywhere near it. No. Because it's my Lego set. Right.

And I'm the out tour. So we've got some more stuff, some more awesome recommendations and we're going to get to it right after this. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for

her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Mangesha Tickler and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Chuck, I really feel like we're helping a lot of people here. I think so too. So we talked about lighting. We talked about the kind of camera equipment you want, and a lot of, well, especially the

first brick film, which we'll talk about later, are silent, they're silent films, which means you don't have to worry about sound. But there's a lot of them that do have sound, dialogue, all that stuff. And you don't have to worry about recording that as you go along. Most of the sound can be recorded in post-production. But you want to have an idea of what is going to be said, where, or what your soundtrack is going to be like, because you have to figure out how long each shot needs to be and how many, ultimately, how many photos you need to take within a given scene or else the voice

over is still going when you just change scenes. Your entire family and friends will laugh at you when you show them your brick film. You don't want to be the Ed Wood of brick films. He just did not care. He didn't care. It was great. That movie was great. One of my favorite parts, aside from everything Bill Murray did, was when Tor bumps the wall

on the way in, and they're like, don't you want to shoot that? Tor just walked in the wall. He's like, no, I like it. It's real. Let's use it. So expressions and drama, these little Lego folks aren't super expressive in the face, but they suggested in this article, and it kind of makes sense, pop that head off and put on something else, could be a ping-pong ball that you draw faces on.

Well, there are different minifigs that have different expressions, and so you can just interchange their heads. Oh, OK. So if someone needs a look of horror, just put on the horror face. Right. Gotcha. That makes sense. And then, apparently, there's companies that will customize facial expressions on your

minifigures. Yeah. And I imagine if you have some money, then you can get that done. That's right. And now I want to go, not off topic, but off article and say, story, story, story. If you are going to make a brick film or any film, have a good story. Just because it's a two-minute Lego brick film, it's going to stink if it's just no matter how good it looks.

It's not going to be fun to watch unless you have a good little story. So write something out that's good and engaging or funny, and it doesn't have to be super long to have a little character arc or story arc. Have your guy chased by something else? Yeah. I watched one the other day, and it was fun. It was silly. It was one Lego guy helping the guy next door do all his chores.

Is it the dandelion? Oh, I don't know the name of it. But he was helping him mow and helping him put on shutters and doing all this stuff, and all the while, his home was getting beaten up, and that's all they needed was that one little joke at the end where they showed the nice house and then the house in tatters. Yeah. It's a very Einrandian brick film. Was it?

Don't help your neighbor. Oh, sure. Your own house will fall to pieces if you help your neighbor. Well, take care of yourself. The character was John Galt, so there may be something there. So anyway, yeah, story. I would encourage you to make something engaging and then make it look good. Yeah.

All right. That's my soapbox moment. That was great. That was good stuff. All right. So are we going to software? Yeah, I think so, because you're going to find very quickly when you have 7,200 photos, you need a way to turn them into a video.

They don't just automatically turn into a video like that. And you can't just do a flip book on the internet, because you'd have to shoot that anyway and run it through software eventually, so you might as well not go to that extra step. Just get yourself some stop motion animating software. And there's plenty of them out there. There's some that cost tons of money, some that are free. Lego has one. Yeah.

Called Lego Movie Maker. Yeah, it's a little app you can make your own little. They encourage the making of brick films, of course. Right. So depending on the kind of software you have, there's some that will automatically import from your camera. There's some that will, that has something called onion skinning. Yeah, that's pretty neat.

Which shows like a transparency of the last shot over the current shot, so you can make sure everything's going the way you need to. Very helpful. If you need to stop and reshoot one of those photos, you know, you can real quick. Yeah. It's got to be super helpful to have that. Oh, sure. And the whole thing's going to put it all in order, animate it, and then it's probably

also going to have some sort of whiz bang features. Like there's one called rotoscope, which makes things glow, which comes in very handy if you're doing a Star Wars brick film and you want to make the lightsabers glow. That's right. Some of them might have their little CGI tricks built in, or you can do some lo-fi CGI of your own with a little investigating and learning on the YouTube. It's not super hard to learn a couple of basic things. And again, these are brick films.

This one that I watched had some lo-fi like fire effect, and you know, it looked great for what it was supposed to be. Yeah. You know, it's not supposed to be a Hollywood action thriller. It's a brick film. Right. So it can look kind of campy and corny, and it still works. Did you ever see the Matrix brick film?

No. Was it good? Yeah. I think it's not even like a shot-for-shot thing in the Matrix. It's like in addition to it. It's super gory. Oh, wow. And it's just incredibly well done.

It is like Hollywood action thriller brick film. Nice. You have to check that out. Well, there's hundreds and hundreds. I would say thousands. Thousands at this point. Brick films. The first one that they, I watched this one actually in 1973.

Yeah, it's cute. Lars and Eindrick Haaseng made a little Super 8 brick film called Journey to the Moon. And you know, it's cute. It's like me and my brother. It's like kids playing around, and then it looks pretty good. Yes. And especially when you consider that they were doing film and using film editing software and stuff to put this thing together.

Yeah. It's kind of mind-blowing that these two kids put this together and made basically the first brick film. What's more, since it was 1973, this was five years before the minifigures came out. Yeah. So they had to build their own characters out of Legos. Tough. Good stuff.

And then there's another classic brick film from the late 1990s by Lindsay Flea. I think the late 80s. What did I say? Late 90s? Uh-huh. Yeah, late 80s is what I meant. The Magic Portal, and that was shot on 16 millimeter film. Have you seen that?

Yeah. It looks great. He was a film student and actually got money from a grant from the Australian Film Commission. And a bunch of people donated Lego sets, and it looks really good. Yeah. And it took him years to do it. It took, I think, more than a year to just shoot the photos. Yeah.

I mean, now you know why my films were all 12 seconds long. You know? This one's like 16 minutes long. Crazy. Uh, what are some of the other big ones? Star Wars, the Han Solo affair? Yeah. A lot of Star Wars ones.

Yeah. Have you seen Monty Python and Holy Grail? No. Shot for shot of the Camelot song? Got to see this. And like, not only is it shot for shot, it's so great. They got the lighting correct on every shot. Really?

Like, it's not like, oh, there's some inside Lego world. It looks like they took the original Monty Python, this minute and 15 second clip, and like ran it through like a Lego nader. Wow. Like, they got the lighting perfect. You got to see it, man. Yeah. It's probably the best one.

I have to check that out. And there's some really great ones out here. Like again, that Matrix one, amazing. But, um, and I have to say, I am a fan of the Magic Portal now. Yeah. But this Monty Python one is just, it's just mind blowing, and that is by spite your face. They seem to be the premier brick film studio. Yeah.

They do. They've done a lot of them. Um, I was about to remark about the, the attention to detail and like the Monty Python thing, but I think that's by nature what you're getting with these people who make these. Yeah. If you don't have an attention, like a scary attention for detail, you're not going to be working in stop motion anyway. Yeah.

They do stuff by like Nick Park in Ardman Animation, did Wallace and Gromit in the Creature Comfort series. They look like the detail is so great because that's just their deal. California Raisins. Remember them? Oh yeah. Good attention to detail. Yeah.

Uh, did you see the Lego movie? I didn't. I didn't either. I heard it was great. Yeah. I want to see it, but, um, is it a brick film or not? No. No.

No, it's not. It was all CGI. Sure. It didn't have to be stop motion, but typically it should be, and at least like it should be real life Lego figures, not CGI ones, but apparently it had plenty of homages to brick films in general. Yeah. I didn't know that.

I think that's kind of neat. Yeah. So the impression I have from researching this is that Lego as a company is very aware of brick films, obviously, because they have the Movie Maker app. Oh, dude, they love it. You did me. They give a ward out for brick films. Yeah.

And in the Lego movie, it was kind of a tribute to brick films. Yeah. A little tip of the old cap. Old Kirk Christensen would have been like, oh yeah, Lego loves this stuff. You know, make a Star Wars one, make a Ghostbusters one, make an Indiana Jones one. Buy, buy, buy kids. Don't make three Star Wars ones. But who would do that?

Make a Star Wars and a Ghostbusters and a, and a, uh, all right, Planet of the Apes. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. Uh, you got anything else, man? Nope. Brick films. Again, this is another entry in our quest to explain absolutely everything there is on Earth and beyond.

So enjoy it, everybody. Lighten up. Uh, if you want to know more about brick films, you can type that word, one word into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, but even more than that, I would encourage you to just type that word into your favorite search engine and sit back and start watching brick films. Delightful. They are amazing. Yeah.

And once I said your favorite search engine, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, uh, jokester husband. Hey guys, listen to the podcast on revenge this morning. Uh, as usual, I really enjoyed it and made me think of a revenge story in my own life that backfired, uh, then became something pretty amazing. My wife and our big jokesters, when we found, uh, when we were first married, my wife thought it would be funny to throw a bucket of cold water over me while I was taking a shower. Yeah.

And I'm sure that revenge is a dish best served cold, which is by the way, one of my favorite, uh, sayings of all time, uh, and that my revenge would come tenfold. So about three years and two children later, my wife took a pregnancy test afraid that she was pregnant since our son was three, our daughter was, uh, nine. My wife was a bit freaked out at having another kid. Test ended up being negative and she was relieved. She left the pregnancy test in the back of the toilet, went to grab a center while she was gone using a pen I was able to make the pregnancy test look positive and put it back

where she left it. Uh, I never, uh, will forget the look of terror on her face when she eventually saw it, came walking to the room with a test, I immediately started joking with her about how exciting it is and really playing up the ruse. I didn't let her dangle too much though before telling her the truth. It was a good time and laughs were had by all. One month later, she actually was pregnant and quickly found out that we had twins. Wow.

So to this day, she playfully blames me for our seven year old twin boys. It is his fault. It was a great lesson in karma and the aftermath of revenge isn't always a bad thing. This world wouldn't be the same without our two little guys. What a sweet dude. So that, uh, Danny DeMarco started off as kind of like a jerky thing to do, but turned out great. Nice.

Thanks, Danny DeMarco. From Dallas. Great name too. Yeah. Danny DeMarco DeDallas. Uh, if you want to get in touch with us like Danny did, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Podcast and I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed?

What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Cheekies and Chill on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts.