Was THE LEGO® Film™ stop-motion?

Was THE LEGO® MOVIE™ terminate-motion?

It was the question on everybody's lips after watching the movie. Including yours, given that you lot're reading this article. And it's an understandable ane to have, given that the picture show's directors' stated aim was to "make sure the audience were dislocated about what they were seeing, about whether information technology was actually stop-movement or a computer-generated film", production designer Grant Freckelton told Voice in 2017.

Just like then many of Life's Nifty Questions, the respond isn't as simple as a yes or a no.

That'due south considering the film is a hybrid. It utilizes calculator-generated blitheness of existent LEGO® elements, achieved in a photoreal stop-movement style. (Don't worry, nosotros needed to read that sentence twice, too.)

In this article, nosotros've broken down what that exactly means, and even sprinkled in a few Easter eggs along the style!

Higher up all else, the directors of both films wanted to make the pic wait homemade – exactly every bit if it was all created by a child (albeit a child with a Hollywood-sized budget).

As co-director Chris Miller explains in a 2015 Warner Bros. documentary 'Creating the Bricks', "the idea was to take a very homemade, [finish-motion] LEGO brick moving-picture show and try and make that as cinematic as possible, with lighting and camera angles and the type of things that yous would do on a large-budget live-activity film."

How did they achieve this?

Firstly, information technology'due south worth saying that everything you see in the films is 100% LEGO bricks. The various cities, planets, galaxies, vehicles… all of it was designed from scratch, in a mode that followed the 'rules' of existent-life LEGO pieces, before being digitized. In other words, not a faux LEGO exterior in sight.

As the CG supervisor of the moving picture Aidan Sarsfield put it, "the brick engineering that is behind this film is quite remarkable. When you meet a vista of thousands and thousands of buildings, those buildings are real LEGO buildings that haven't been cheated, they are fabricated out of bricks." – Creating the Bricks, 2015, Warner Bros.

In the documentary, Chris Miller explained that the reasoning backside this was "so that if you froze any unmarried frame of the film, it would exist something you could actually build yourself." Fifty-fifty if it was something circuitous similar an explosion, or an ocean wave, or mud splashed upward onto a camera 'lens' past a rogue LEGO Batmobile™.

To accurately build upward the sets brick past brick, the designers of the film used a digital modeling programme. But instead of being some ludicrously expensive software you've never heard of, the main program used was really our own, humble, digital building tool, LEGO Digital Designer, which is available for free for anyone to use!

But while such programs would faithfully replicate the physics of LEGO building (for example past not assuasive pieces that don't correspond to one some other to fit together), the problem with relying on them entirely would exist that the eventual output might be something that isn't a practical LEGO build.

For instance, in THE LEGO MOVIE 2™, the moviemakers wanted the character of Ultrakatty to take as many spikes as possible. Simply information technology was only through experimenting and interacting with real-life prototypes that the flick designers realized that although having loads of spikes might look cool, information technology would be impossible to properly hold for someone trying to play with information technology.

Now, you might be wondering why that would be such a problem… as long as it looks cool?

It all goes dorsum to the aim of the directors to make every role of the films look like information technology was made by a kid. If a child couldn't agree the models, that would chip away at the… (it seems weird to say this, but the) 'realism' for which they were and so striving. And so, the directors got to play with countless real-life prototypes of the characters before signing off on them. Sorry, did nosotros say play with? We meant 'evaluate'.

Easter egg time! You tin can come across loads of the original graphic symbol, set and vehicle prototypes littered throughout the alive-action scenes in both the movies!

Onto the animation. While the film is reckoner-generated, the animators of the moving-picture show (the Australian studio Animal Logic) were asked to brand the film follow the laws of stop-motion as best they could. This means that the figurines were quite limited by their concrete dimensions: elbows couldn't bend, legs couldn't stretch, and then on. There are some examples of these rules being loosened, for example when a grapheme needs to 'nod'. Merely, by and large, the dominion of pausing the films at whatsoever moment and being able to recreate what was on the screen extends to the characters.

Of course, following the rules of stop-motion animation alone isn't plenty to make the movies feel homemade. For that, they also needed to have imperfections. The kind of imperfections that were inserted with an extraordinary level of precision into the films. In 'Creating the Bricks', co-managing director Phil Lord talks about "putting all this inquiry and development into how to get fingerprint smudges onto the LEGO bricks", and you can see the results of their considerable efforts on a lot of the characters, including nearly often on Emmet's shiny plastic.

Spot those fingerprint smudges?

Likewise as this, characters were designed with imperfections in mind. In particular, Benny the 1980s spaceman was modeled after Chris Miller's actual toy spaceman he'd had since he was a kid, which was well-known to have a design flaw in the helmet causing it to crevice. (Side note – are nosotros allowed to say that? Accept we passed the statute of limitations where we are allowed to talk well-nigh the defects of 40-year sometime LEGO models? If you are reading this sentence, so the answer is "yes… I think".) That's a quote from the movie, for those who didn't catch on.

There's one final question to exist asked here – what with all the work that went into making every last thing buildable, the microscopes and dioramas, the endless enquiry into imperfections, and all the painstaking work and production that went into making the picture look like a homemade stop-movement flick… Why not just brand information technology stop-motion?

To answer that, we'll only direct you to the part of the starting time motion picture that was made in the classic stop-movement style – the end credits. Made by Stoopid Stoodios (best known for their work on 'Robot Chicken'), the 3-minute sequence took 3 total-time animators two months to create. The incredible final twelve seconds of the credits, which features all the previous sets blithe simultaneously, had EACH of the 3 animators moving 150 LEGO pieces per FRAME. (!!!)

The time and effort that would be required for that technique stretched beyond a full-length moving picture is most incalculable. Simply luckily, only about… because it was figured out when the beginning movie was being developed. To create THE LEGO Motion-picture show™ in stop-movement would have taken x years and 15 1000000 LEGO pieces.

Maybe they'll effort it for the adjacent LEGO movie… although for our sakes we it comes sooner!