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!How many Lego pieces did it take to make The Lego Movie?
As it turns out, the film’s creators, directing and writing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, didn’t just rely on actual Legos for the film; as the New York Times pointed out, just the number of bricks required for the task alone would’ve already cost millions of dollars. According to Warner Bros. Pictures, there are a total of 3,863,484 unique Lego bricks seen in the movie. But if you were to recreate the entire film only using Legos, you’d need 15,080,330, the studio said. With a unique blend of CG animation and actual Lego sets, the final look of The Lego Movie has a surprising visual depth; it almost appears as if someone painstakingly animated each and every movement through stop-motion. That’s because the animators went to great lengths to ensure that they included aspects of real Lego pieces when creating their characters. In the video above, which was edited using footage provided by the studio, several animators of the film describe the intricate process of bringing virtual Lego bricks and scenes to life.
“We tried to be quite authentic with the actual Lego product itself,” said CG supervisor Damien Gray. “There’s a lot of detail put into the sticker work, the decal work, the mold lines, chips, chunks, scratches — we tried to incorporate a lot of that.” In order to achieve that “played-with” look for Emmet and the other 182 unique minifigures that appear in the film, animators observed the physical models under microscopes to get every detail right. In addition to scrutinizing the appearance of the Lego bricks themselves, Lord and Miller also took into account other factors they wanted to mimic from stop-motion videos. “If you were animating this in real life, there would be all of these dust particles, and there is a bit of actual dandruff,” Miller told the Times. “We did a little test of how much was too much.” So what else from the film resembles real life? Take a look at this blooper reel in which the Legos (or is it their voiceover actors?) have a little too much fun:
Despite the blocky, herky-jerky quality of their visuals, 2014’s The Lego Movie and its box-office-ruling spinoff, The Lego Batman Movie, were not actually filmed in stop-motion. (It would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy the bricks alone.) Instead, The Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay labored to replicate the analog effect digitally, drawing on his work for TV shows like Robot Chicken. Given his experience, we asked him for some tips on how to make a (legitimately stop-motion) Lego movie of our own. Low-budget, of course—we don’t have tens of thousands either. Getting that perfect stop-motion feel requires keeping both your camera and the set nice and stable. McKay recommends a GorillaPod, a flexible tripod that can anchor a phone to most surfaces. Securing the Legos is easier, since the pieces are designed to stick together. Just weigh down the sides of the set to make sure you don’t accidentally move it between frames. Good illumination is essential to achieving a professional look, but the small scale of the Lego pieces makes it tricky to use traditional stage lighting.