The Lego Movie co-writer and director Phil Lord has spoken about the tough decisions behind the film's twist reveal.The popular animated movie featuring a world of Lego characters was revealed to be in the imagination of a young boy, whose strict father was played by Will Ferrell.Lord has revealed how he and fellow writer and director Chris Miller agonized over whether or not to include the live action elements of the film."The whole movie got rewritten, thrown out, rewritten again, thrown out in production, rewritten again... so many scenes felt tough to write," he told Vulture."That's definitely the case with animated movies, and since we were writing and directing, it was even harder. The writer in you writes a script that you think is perfect, and then the director in you reads it and throws it out and tells you to go back to the drawing board! That's a very schizophrenic approach to filmmaking."He continued: "The live-action segment with Will Ferrell definitely went through the most iterations.
It was baked in from the beginning, but it changed and changed and changed."We knew we were gonna do it and I had faith it was going to work, but it was a lot of buttressing and throwing things out. How much live action should we reveal before we got to that moment? We storyboarded that sequence for a year and a half before we got to it, and tried it a million different ways."The son wasn't always in the movie. That was a thing that happened two years ago, when we finally figured the scene out. It was just going to be about Will Ferrell, but we thought, 'The movie can't just be about one character, it has to be about a relationship. Maybe this movie is about a father and a son'. And that's what opened it up for us, and seemed to resonate for a lot of people."Lord added that Ferrell and the team were warned that the scenes may not be used in the final cut.He said: "When we pitched it, we could definitely tell that people were thinking to themselves, 'Well, if it doesn't work, we can always cut it out'.
Certainly, we thought that maybe we would do that. Right before we shot it, we promised everybody that if it didn't work, we had an alternative that was animated. But that was a lie. We were betting on ourselves that we were right two years earlier when we thought it would be surprising and delightful."Phil Lord and Chris Miller recently revealed that The Lego Movie 2 will be set four years after the first film. The sequel will be released in 2018.They are also currently producing The Lego Batman Movie, with Chris McKay directing and Seth Grahame-Smith writing.Warner Bros. is plotting a new DC superhero film based on the Batman-centric character Nightwing. Chris McKay, who most recently directed The Lego Batman Movie for Warner Bros., is in negotiations to helm the new live-action film, and Bill Dubuque (The Accountant) is writing the script. Nightwing, aka Dick Grayson, is perhaps best known for being the original Robin. Grayson was the youngest member of a family of acrobats known as the Flying Graysons.
He was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger and illustrator Jerry Robinson, and first introduced in Detective Comics No. 38 in April 1940. After his parents were murdered, he was taken in as the legal ward of Bruce Wayne/Batman. He then became Robin and teamed up with the Dark Knight on many an adventure to fight crime in the city of Gotham. Grayson famously shed his persona in the 1980s as the character aged up, and became the leader of the Teen Titans. (In the DC Universe, a succession of young men took on the mantle of Robin while Nightwing became a popular character in his own right, headlining his own comics and appearing in animated movies.) McKay has already directed a film with Dick Grayson in it: The character appeared in Lego Batman, as Robin, and was voiced by Michael Cera. Nightwing will be his live-action feature film debut. The character of Robin has yet to officially appear in the new Warner Bros. movies, although his graffiti-covered suit was shown in Batman v. Superman, and director Zack Snyder has said that at that point in time Robin had been killed by the Joker (there have been multiple Robins over the years in the comics, and Snyder did not say which one was killed by the Joker in his film
, although it is likely Jason Todd if the film is aligning with the comics). The Nightwing project joins Warner Bros.' growing DC Extended Universe as the studio focuses on mining some of DC's most beloved characters for new films (as an example, Gotham City Sirens, with David Ayer attached to direct, will focus on the female villains of the universe, including Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn). The next films to hit theaters include Wonder Woman starring Gal Gadot (June 2), the star-studded Justice League (Nov. 17) and Aquaman starring Jason Momoa (Oct. 5, 2018). A sequel to Suicide Squad, The Batman starring Ben Affleck, a Shazam film, a Flash film and a Cyborg project are also in the works. McKay made his feature-film helming debut with hit animated superhero comedy The Lego Batman Movie, which has earned $182.4 million to date after hitting theaters on Feb. 21. He previously worked on The Lego Movie as an animation co-director, and has also directed three seasons of series Robot Chicken.
McKay is repped by UTA, Rise Management and Morris Yorn. Along with The Accountant (which starred current Batman Ben Affleck), Dubuque previously wrote The Judge and A Family Man. He is repped by CAA, Zero Gravity Management and Bloom Hergott.Like many stop motion animation fans I’m really looking forward to seeing The LEGO Movie coming out on February 7th. If you haven’t seen the trailer make sure to check it out!Looks like an amazing stop motion movie. If you look closely you’ll see that some scenes from The LEGO Movie trailer look digital, while other scenes look like they were animated using actual LEGO bricks. Some look like a mix of both. What’s going on here? In fact, not too many people are sure whether this is a digital movie or a stop motion movie. Because I was curious I did some research and found out that people have been asking the directors of The LEGO Movie about this for quite some time but the directors haven’t been very clear about it. Check out this panel from the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller answer the question in the first couple minutes of this video:
I also found some tweets by Chris Miller from back in June that seem to confirm a hybrid animation style. To curious: #TheLegoMovie is a hybrid film. CG w/ real Lego elements done in a photoreal stop-motion style. & a secret bit of live-action. — Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) June 20, 2013 Day 1 of 5-day Lego Movie live-action shoot with Will Ferrell. — Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) June 4, 2013 So the answer to the question “Is the LEGO Movie stop motion or CGI?” actually could be both! And from the sound of it the Directors don’t want to let us know exactly what parts are CGI and what parts may be stop motion. Either way it’s still pretty cool to know that at least some parts of this movie may be made from real LEGO bricks. That’s a win in my book! On the day of the movie's release, more information is coming out about the production process. Here's another tweet from filmmaker Chris Miller @DrewAtHitFix it was mostly CG with some stop motion & also some real LEGO still sets comped in.
But Animal Logic made the CG photoreal. — Chris Miller (@chrizmillr) February 3, 2014 The film was made using mostly CGI. Special care was taken to ensure the LEGO world reflected the dynamics and appearance of real LEGO bricks. The creators examined parts under microscopes to better understand how they wore down over time. Animators experimented with different levels of dust and dirt on surfaces, and added imperfections to models, like tiny gaps between bricks. It's great to have confirmation of something we suspected all along. The creators of this movie were inspired by watching actual brickfilms. Here's an article in the NYT with more coverage of the production. This article at CGMeetup has a few more images from the studio. Check out the images of Emmet's expressions, video of the CGI animation process, and a real LEGO mock-up of a ship in the film in the video above! Did you enjoy this post? Learn more about stop motion with the Stopmotion Explosion Animation Kit - a complete animation package!