The Lego Movie still remains one of my favourite animated movies, not just because I grew up with Lego, but also because it was more than just a commercial film, it was a heartfelt, well written and passionate celebration of the power of imagination and creativity that made the childhoods of countless people, including myself.
It doesn't matter if it is being done by a different film company as long it is the same film but like the continuing of the previous film and not something else I never used to like the lego movie but I now I regret saying that because after I heard warner bros can no longer make lego movies it broke my heart I feel bad for warner bros I really do I feel like they lost everything
It shouldn't. The Academy is made up of a panel of Hollywood directors who aren't mandated to watch anything. A LOT of them are the old guard who are firmly entrenched in the "animation is for kids" camp. The "Best Animated Film" category is a joke because these guys only even watch animated films with their kids, and they only end up voting for what they've actually seen, making it less "Best Animated Film" and more "The Animated Film that the most Academy members watched". The LEGO Movie didn't get nominated because most academy directors didn't even bother to watch it, and they didn't bother to watch it because their kids either didn't watch it or they didn't watch it with their kids. Seriously, the Academy directors aren't even required to watch anything that's been nominated. The whole Academy Awards is basically invalid as a result, as it often comes down to "how many members watched this movie".
Setting aside the issue of the Oscar's just being an entirely self congratulatory effort, any film released in February is practically dead for Oscar nominations since those happen in Nov/Dec.
The Lego Movie understood its audience more than most. It's all in the details; the real registry numbers from the kits, Benny and his aesthetic being a callback to the first Lego Space set from the 80's, and even the blink and you'll miss it Bionicle reference.
My favourite part that wasn't mentioned, is the way that "squash and stretch" animation is approached. For certain frames they just add more Lego bricks to make a certain body part longer, for example
Lego may have one of the best strategic teams of any company; the way they have kept their brand fresh for so long through ever more ingenuous kits, movies, tie ins and games is staggering.
The most impressive thing to me was how they used real pieces for almost everything. Playing the lego games when I was younger, there were a lot of scenes that were not fully "lego". Like the floors and other materials were generic. Like a muddy floor texture to represent a jungle floor. They didn't have the iconic studs LEGO on them. The movie had these pretty much everywhere I can think of. Imagine rendering all of those pieces. Impressive
Pretty much the only thing the LEGO pieces are missing are the serial number, which the director also wanted to add but he was ultimately convinced otherwise.
Even the LEGO Movie Video Game tried as hard as it could to adhere to this. Almost everything in that game was LEGO, unlike the other Telltale LEGO games.
i heard that if you paused the lego movie at literally any frame in the entire film, you'd be able to rebuild the entire image with actual legos, and i think thats just insane, really made it incredible and makes it look not fake
Yes, that's true because the movie never used motion blur, so the movie is effectively a string of still images. Also the bricks used are actual Lego bricks, there was even discussion of including serial numbers for the bricks (where they actually would be). TLDR: Yes, very true
Well, of course. They're not adding any further animated movies of 2014, so it's unlikely that the LEGO Movie will lose that title in the foreseeable future.
Dragon Trainer 2 & Big hero 6 were two others really excellent animated movies from 2014. Also Penguins of Madagascar was ok and fun at times but that just my opinion
And it will still look amazing in 20 years, _because_ they did it the way they did. Lego stop motion is Lego stop motion. It doesn't evolve over time like more "realistic" CGI does, so it ages much better.
I remember watching this in theaters as a kid, and having been so convinced that this entire movie was stop-motion. I remember telling my mom that it was (without research, and I was a kid as well) and she was greatly amazed. But this movie is so special to me, I was never excited about a movie as much as this one.
A big part u didn't mention was the focus limits they artificially placed on the camera. Why? Because cameras have difficulty focusing on tiny objects up close! By adding extra blurr in the background or even closer characters it subconsciously implies the size of the film. All other lego animations b4 did not do this, so there is an awkward feeling where characters are being represented as nearly the size of adult humans, it gives off an odd vibe. But when the lens blurr is added to the edges it implies a tiny universe where they are the correct size that we know and love!
@@DeletedDevilDeletedAngelyes but this is referring to the application of the blur and the way it visually displays depth differently while most other films use blur to draw focus onto a person or object
As a Brickfilmer myself, I gotta say that the animation in the LEGO Movie shines on how it captures the escence of Brickfilms, sometimes I slow down the film just to recreate the movements on it, as all articulation in the movie is loyal to the toy, is quite fluid and heavily expresive!
I grew up making brickfilms, and I seriously thought this was all done in stop motion. The high I felt watching The Lego Movie for the first time, seeing my childhood hobby on the big screen, has never been matched by another movie.
This was also one of the first animated movies that used a realistic color space resulting in crisp highlights that catch the edges of the pieces as well as high definition in the darker parts of the screen.
5:03 "Every movement is one that could realistically be made by lego pieces" the clip you play while saying this is literally one of the biggest exceptions to this rule. Lego minifigures can't bend that far backwards, and they warp the hip piece slightly to keep it from clipping through the legs.
They started to bend this rule more in later Lego films didn't they? I think Batman and Ninjago used minifig arms that had a little more sideways motion than a real one would.
@@geolawie when that happens the arms are kinda floating out of socket. Which absolutely breaks the rules don't get me wrong, but the pieces aren't being distorted as much as this scene
@@geolawiethey also used other pieces to portray different movements that wouldn't be possible with the normal arms. If we were going to have an in-universe explanation my guess is that it's because The Lego Movie was a kid playing with the Legos, while the Ninjago movie was someone telling the story, while the Batman movie was just an in-universe story.
They have been pretty open with how they "cheated" at times to get the movement necessary. Popping out arms to get wider arm movements and such. But I still think it doesn't break the illusion. As you easily can imagine a stop motion brick film enthusiast do the same cheats with real lego pieces.
I remember making brick films with my friends back when I was a kid in the 90’s with my parents’ old camcorder. To get a frame you’d press record once and then push it again a split second later. All dialogue you’d record on a longer take so no movement while talking. No consistent frame rate and our animations were laughably bad but we had fun. I don’t know what happened to those old tapes (if they weren’t recorded over by school concerts or whatever), but I wish I still had them.
I did the same. We had a house with one vcr on top of another. The camcorder stop/start you talk about was a real limitation. One of our vcr's had 'Playx2' button. When I played back the animation at double speed, it all seemed to work.
So... one thing about the visuals for the LEGO Movie is that instead of just being yet another CGI film, it used CGI to emulate stop-motion. Normally, when you try to use CGI to "replace" something in real life it can look a bit off, but LEGO as a medium makes it super easy to pull of as untextured plastic is practically the easiest material to render photorealistically. The bump mapping complicates things a little but it's not the same as trying to render skin.
Slight misconception there. They put a huuuge amount of work into the raytracing used for the subsurface scattering used on the plastic (Subsurface scattering being the light that passes through the material, same issue with skin on flesh). This along with reflections, fingerprints (that go across multiple models), dust/hair, and 10s of millions of polygons per frame, made them realise no normal photorealistic renderer would work. So, in fact, the technical director had to develop a new photorealistic renderer to meet their demands of insane detail with light and geometry. That technical director, Max Liani, was actually so good that he's now the Principle Engineer of Raytracing at Nvidia.
@@HeyJD123 Not really a misconception. Plastic's still easier to render than most other materials, even with raytracing involved, and even with the additional textures to add fingerprints and the like. At the end of the day, plastic's a smooth and typically semi-reflective material, so even if you have tons of stuff in a scene the calculations are relatively easy by comparison. The big thing here is the 10s of millions of polygons. That requires either a ton of system resources or an extremely efficient rendering engine and a still very large but comparatively smaller amount of system resources. By any chance is the rendering engine you're referring to nVidia Iray? Because I have some experience with it myself.
It's INSANE how the studio who made the Lego movie still had to rely on LDD instead of getting access to official 3d models directly by the Lego Group!
You can choose to fight a medium or you can embrace it. Lego as a film medium has so many limitations, and every CG Lego film up to this point choose to pretend every single limitation didn’t exist.
7:14 They absolutely succeeded. I have seen the movie so many times I've lost counts, but I can say it all verbatim while watching it, and now I can't even watch it without a tub of Lego to build and play while the movie goes.
5:02 "every movment is one that could realistically be made by lego pieces" . Shows scene where lego figure bends backwards over 90 degrees when in reality roughly 70 is the limit
My favorite part of this movie - and you can see it at 5:16 - is the way they use Lego bricks to create smear frames. It would have been so easy to just make normal smears, since you don’t even see it long enough to really notice in theater, and yet it’s so incredible that they put in the effort to use bricks to make them.
The more I learn about this movie, the more bitter I get that this wasn’t nominated for Best Animated Feature. And I was already pretty bitter to begin with. I do love Laika and The Boxtrolls, but man, did this film deserve its spot if we really must limit the nominations to 5 entries.
It was, and still is, infuriating they did not get the credit they deserved at the Oscars. It's one the most visually stunning animation movies of the pas 25 years.
I was honestly amazed when the movie came out. I never expected anyone could make a LEGO movie that takes the feeling of playing with LEGO and runs with it, but those guys really did it. It had all the nostalgia, the childish excitement and wild imagination a movie like this should've had. And it did everything without making fun of the actual LEGO fans - something a lot of other movies based on toys or cartoons repeatedly fail to do. Absolutely love the movie to bits.
I think the achievement is more in the artistic use of technology rather than a flat-out technological breakthrough. So much of what makes good CG good, comes more from art direction than the actual technology being used.
As someone who grew up on the brickfilm genre and made quite a few stop motion animations myself the Lego movie felt like a return to form to the films that the community was making at home.
The Lego Movie was insane. It was a moving story about religion, generational trauma, family dynamics, romance in the eyes of kids, and being unique even without being some special chosen one! And also sentient legos.
The Lego Movie shows what Lego should be about and should be aiming for. Meanwhile we get more and more collectibles even in the playsets it is hard to find the parts to rebuild or create something new.
The Lego movie had all the potential to be a corporate product. It's still a miracle that something so groundbreaking and incredible could actually come to exist.
I also like how can people turned the way they made the movie in maya and just made a capable way to made it in another program ( blender ) which give you the ability to create quit looking like the movie using some addon like ( mecabrick , epicfigrig , mecaface , mecalizer ) and ofc supporting the people who made it !
I liked how in lego dimensions characters from the lego movie and lego batman movie had animations reminiscent of the stop motion type thing they have in the movies, and everyone else is animated traditionally like rubber
on top of all this, the Lego movie was animated in a new rendering engine that has higher F stop options for the “camera” which created the incredible depth of field, detail, and allowed for amazing lighting all around
Lego Movie came out at a critical time for me. I was a teenager in high school, and it married my waning childhood passion for Lego with my growing appreciation for good filmmaking. This is just about the perfect Lego-themed movie you could ask for-one made with clear passion and understanding of what it’s like to be a child imagining a whole world and story in their head. They completely nailed the aesthetic too. It looks like this could have been fully stop-motion animated.
What I loved best about this movie is that it centers on how kids view their parents when they’re concerned about financial money troubles regarding their children using up their parents cash for their own self benefit, and the 10-year-old boy Finn who Emmet meets at the end of the movie as he enters the human world we discover remodeled the villain of the story Lord Business after his father. That’s the beauty of it. Both characters are played by Will Ferrell, and the animated counterpart of the boy’s father was just him kinda projecting his craving desire to build more sets in the basement but his father wouldn’t let him because the money he spent them on was leaving him broke with his own job so he restricted his son to play with the sets as punishment by gluing the pieces back in place so they couldn’t be moved when touched again. And it’s not until the end of the movie when President Business warms up to Emmett after he returns to the Lego world to save his friends that we see Finn do the same with his father, suggesting that he agreed to put his father’s money to good use making wiser decisions instead of for his own self benefit. Even the second one covers similar underlining plot devices regarding brother and sister issues. I love how in both movies the real conflict is a family issue all along but they don’t show it until the very end and the only clue we get is the conflict the characters in the Lego universe are facing like judgement day or the apocalypse that awaits them. Such a neat metaphor made by the animators. I give praise to Warner Brothers animation studios for that! 😎👍👌
The thing with "Lego Movie" and other, even the ones made this year, Lego movies are that the "Lego Movie" was 100% made of bricks, while on all the other (movies and games) there is a lot of not lego elements. Also the animation of the faces is very good.
Very good video but y’all missed out on one of the important parts, technology advancements that allowed for the level of detail (ACES color system) compared to other animations
ONE OF THE BEST ANIMATED FILMS FROM WB ANIMATION SINCE IRON GIANT, and i wouldnt be surprised if the moment 7:30 became a reference for Mario movie when encountering a similar creature by saying hello
The Lego Movie never deviates from the physical limitations of the minifigs. Most others have a more free-form animation that ignores these limitations.
When this movie came out, it actually had me fooled thinking it was fully stop motion animated. They really captured the style of that genre of animation so well, including smaller details like lots of hard lighting and shallow depth of field, together with believable surface imperfections, low framerates and believable movements, everything just worked.
So it all just comes down to previous movies being animated with “lego style” and the lego movie being animated having in mind it happens in the real world
Something which nobody has mentioned yet is that The Lego Movie was rendered in ACES (I believe it was the first animated movie to use the engine) which allowed for a much higher dynamic range in the image. So the lighting is almost perfectly real, dark areas of the image are properly exposed and still show detail with contrast, and bright areas influence the rest of the scene, even as far as to calculate what that light would do in the lens of the simulated camera to give a real impression of lens-flare. Others have also mentioned that the simulation also runs in real Lego size, so close up shots simulate the depth of field of a real camera filming one of those classic brick animations.
That might be the last time I expected something to be terrible and it was actually great. Slight niggle, they did cheat a bit here and there. You can see at 1:40 they give the shoulder joints more range, and they might even bend the elbows a bit, hard to tell. But that's okay, it doesn't break the illusion.
honestly i would imagine this movie would be one of the things that amazed a little kid who watched this and developed an interest in making lego films and now, is that 14yo who animated the lego section of across the spiderverse
this movie is practically as ingrained into my brain as my name is, i watched it so many times as a kid, maybe thats why i'm so creative and like to think outside the box, the lesson really stuck with me I guess.
Stellar. Excellent video! I'd also like to note the use of REALLY shallow Depth of Field while rendering, simulating that of a real camera, shooting macro on such *tiny* little pieces. That REALLY helped to illustrate the scale, in a way that most might not notice! And the subsurface scattering of light, just like real plastics! The whole movie was such a visual treat! 💛
I had two classic space men, one blue, one red. They had the exact same rub-off of the logo on their torso and both their helmets were cracked exactly like Benny's. Although mine obv had no face left😂. To see this beat up and played with character brought to the screen tells you that these guys get it.
I don't know how this movie went past my radar, but it's cool to see the inspiration for stuff like recent Spider-Verse and Puss in Boots embracing the more creative approach to animation. Great video.
This isn't really "motion blur" per se, but actually a different time-honoured animation technique - smear frames! You also see them used to good effect on the Spiderverse movies. When something is moving fast, the animators will do things like use a strangely distorted shape on a single frame to give an effect similar to motion blur, or sometimes have something shown in multiple places at the same time.
The interjected movie clips started to feel like watch mojo levels of bad in a few spots, mostly and often felt irrelevant. A shame because the actual analysis is very entertaining and informative!
It's also well worth watching in 3D precisely because of its animation. If you don't have a compatible bluray player, it is possible to play the 3D bluray disc in a PS4 and use a Playstation VR to watch the movie, like I did. I wish I knew more alternates to watch 3D Bluray discs, but I don't.
The Lego Movie still remains one of my favourite animated movies, not just because I grew up with Lego, but also because it was more than just a commercial film, it was a heartfelt, well written and passionate celebration of the power of imagination and creativity that made the childhoods of countless people, including myself.
💯💯. Exactly
It was a heartfelt, well-written, and passionate celebration of imagination and creativity.
NAILED IT!
What about Lego top gear
Lego is one of the few corporations that still has a soul.
It doesn't matter if it is being done by a different film company as long it is the same film but like the continuing of the previous film and not something else I never used to like the lego movie but I now I regret saying that because after I heard warner bros can no longer make lego movies it broke my heart I feel bad for warner bros I really do I feel like they lost everything
How this didn’t even get a nomination for best animated feature will forever baffle me
It shouldn't. The Academy is made up of a panel of Hollywood directors who aren't mandated to watch anything. A LOT of them are the old guard who are firmly entrenched in the "animation is for kids" camp. The "Best Animated Film" category is a joke because these guys only even watch animated films with their kids, and they only end up voting for what they've actually seen, making it less "Best Animated Film" and more "The Animated Film that the most Academy members watched". The LEGO Movie didn't get nominated because most academy directors didn't even bother to watch it, and they didn't bother to watch it because their kids either didn't watch it or they didn't watch it with their kids.
Seriously, the Academy directors aren't even required to watch anything that's been nominated. The whole Academy Awards is basically invalid as a result, as it often comes down to "how many members watched this movie".
because the oscar hates animation
Setting aside the issue of the Oscar's just being an entirely self congratulatory effort, any film released in February is practically dead for Oscar nominations since those happen in Nov/Dec.
Possibly because it had live-action sequences and therefore wasn't elligible?
@@curtisharvey2330
Possible, but it's more likely that it's just that no one in the academy bothered to watch it.
The Lego Movie understood its audience more than most. It's all in the details; the real registry numbers from the kits, Benny and his aesthetic being a callback to the first Lego Space set from the 80's, and even the blink and you'll miss it Bionicle reference.
Wait, there was a Bionicle reference???
@@eeveeofalltrades4780 It was blink and you'll miss it during Lucy's explanation of the Lego-Verse.
@@ProfDragonite ah, now I remember. Thanks
@repentandbelieveinJesusChrist2discard your life and go and visit your god you utterly worthless Christian nurjob
@repentandbelieveinJesusChrist2Blud copying from a book written by someone high
My favourite part that wasn't mentioned, is the way that "squash and stretch" animation is approached. For certain frames they just add more Lego bricks to make a certain body part longer, for example
That's how you do motion blur in brickfilm
smear frames
@@eMorphized Want true freedom? Come to Jesus Christ 👍😊
Lego may have one of the best strategic teams of any company; the way they have kept their brand fresh for so long through ever more ingenuous kits, movies, tie ins and games is staggering.
Creative team maybe, their actual toy division is terrible nowadays - sadly
@@Corruptedyeah, the prices are way higher but the quality of the sets themselves has gone down massively.
The most impressive thing to me was how they used real pieces for almost everything. Playing the lego games when I was younger, there were a lot of scenes that were not fully "lego". Like the floors and other materials were generic. Like a muddy floor texture to represent a jungle floor. They didn't have the iconic studs LEGO on them. The movie had these pretty much everywhere I can think of. Imagine rendering all of those pieces. Impressive
Like the lollipop on a stick that happened to fit in a minifig hand. I absolutely loved that detail
Pretty much the only thing the LEGO pieces are missing are the serial number, which the director also wanted to add but he was ultimately convinced otherwise.
Em dude in real life people put their Lego on non Lego surfaces too
@@cdgonepotatoes4219 Still got a nod to that when Emmett's Master Builder powers activate for the first time. Which honestly makes that scene cooler.
Even the LEGO Movie Video Game tried as hard as it could to adhere to this. Almost everything in that game was LEGO, unlike the other Telltale LEGO games.
i heard that if you paused the lego movie at literally any frame in the entire film, you'd be able to rebuild the entire image with actual legos, and i think thats just insane, really made it incredible and makes it look not fake
Yes, that's true because the movie never used motion blur, so the movie is effectively a string of still images.
Also the bricks used are actual Lego bricks, there was even discussion of including serial numbers for the bricks (where they actually would be).
TLDR: Yes, very true
@@SyntaxNation86 6 months too late, but i love the final space pfp
Have you heard about STOP MOTION?
@@SyntaxNation86thanks for restating the video we all watched at the same time
@@ArariaKAgelessTraveller It's not stop motion, it's 3D animation. Google it! It's fascinating
The Lego Movie is still one of the best animated movies of 2014 and 2014 was such a good year for movies
Well, of course. They're not adding any further animated movies of 2014, so it's unlikely that the LEGO Movie will lose that title in the foreseeable future.
Dragon Trainer 2 & Big hero 6 were two others really excellent animated movies from 2014. Also Penguins of Madagascar was ok and fun at times but that just my opinion
GREAT NERDSTAGIC VIDEO THE LEGO MOVIE 2010.
What do you mean it's "still" one of the best animated movies of 2014?
Like someone is gonna travel back in time and release another one.
@@Locadel2003Dragon Trainer 2? You mean How To Train Your Dragon 2, right?
Fun Fact: Morgan Freeman stated that the Lego Batman in this movie is his favorite incarnation of the character.
I like how abstract the character is, playing on the stereotyping of the character a child would make up for the figure if he was playing with him.
Lego Movie Batman is the best Batman
@repentandbelieveinJesusChrist2shut the fuck up
WHO ALWAYS PAYS HIS TAXES (NOT BATMAN)
@@Goblin_Hater_37 Played by Will Arnett.
The lego movie has such great animation and it feels like not enough people talk about. This movie is almost 10 years old and still looks amazing.
And it will still look amazing in 20 years, _because_ they did it the way they did. Lego stop motion is Lego stop motion. It doesn't evolve over time like more "realistic" CGI does, so it ages much better.
This just gave me a reality check as to how fast time has moved. I remember going to see the movie in theaters…
it is a timeless classic and i had no idea they made a 2nd movie.
I remember watching this in theaters as a kid, and having been so convinced that this entire movie was stop-motion. I remember telling my mom that it was (without research, and I was a kid as well) and she was greatly amazed. But this movie is so special to me, I was never excited about a movie as much as this one.
Common man, there’s so much to be excited about in the world!
A big part u didn't mention was the focus limits they artificially placed on the camera. Why? Because cameras have difficulty focusing on tiny objects up close! By adding extra blurr in the background or even closer characters it subconsciously implies the size of the film. All other lego animations b4 did not do this, so there is an awkward feeling where characters are being represented as nearly the size of adult humans, it gives off an odd vibe. But when the lens blurr is added to the edges it implies a tiny universe where they are the correct size that we know and love!
isnt blur like in every movie?
@@DeletedDevilDeletedAngelyes but this is referring to the application of the blur and the way it visually displays depth differently while most other films use blur to draw focus onto a person or object
@@danielspellman1761 true
I always thought that was because it was originally a 3D movie and it blurred when changed to 2D! Thats fascinating that it was on purpose!
Gotcha, always wondered why other Lego media looked so off, thanks
As a Brickfilmer myself, I gotta say that the animation in the LEGO Movie shines on how it captures the escence of Brickfilms, sometimes I slow down the film just to recreate the movements on it, as all articulation in the movie is loyal to the toy, is quite fluid and heavily expresive!
What the fuck is a brickfilmer
I grew up making brickfilms, and I seriously thought this was all done in stop motion. The high I felt watching The Lego Movie for the first time, seeing my childhood hobby on the big screen, has never been matched by another movie.
This was also one of the first animated movies that used a realistic color space resulting in crisp highlights that catch the edges of the pieces as well as high definition in the darker parts of the screen.
5:03 "Every movement is one that could realistically be made by lego pieces" the clip you play while saying this is literally one of the biggest exceptions to this rule. Lego minifigures can't bend that far backwards, and they warp the hip piece slightly to keep it from clipping through the legs.
They started to bend this rule more in later Lego films didn't they? I think Batman and Ninjago used minifig arms that had a little more sideways motion than a real one would.
@@geolawie when that happens the arms are kinda floating out of socket. Which absolutely breaks the rules don't get me wrong, but the pieces aren't being distorted as much as this scene
@@geolawiethey also used other pieces to portray different movements that wouldn't be possible with the normal arms. If we were going to have an in-universe explanation my guess is that it's because The Lego Movie was a kid playing with the Legos, while the Ninjago movie was someone telling the story, while the Batman movie was just an in-universe story.
They have been pretty open with how they "cheated" at times to get the movement necessary. Popping out arms to get wider arm movements and such. But I still think it doesn't break the illusion. As you easily can imagine a stop motion brick film enthusiast do the same cheats with real lego pieces.
🤓
I remember making brick films with my friends back when I was a kid in the 90’s with my parents’ old camcorder. To get a frame you’d press record once and then push it again a split second later. All dialogue you’d record on a longer take so no movement while talking. No consistent frame rate and our animations were laughably bad but we had fun. I don’t know what happened to those old tapes (if they weren’t recorded over by school concerts or whatever), but I wish I still had them.
Atleast you got some great memories bro.
I did the same. We had a house with one vcr on top of another. The camcorder stop/start you talk about was a real limitation. One of our vcr's had 'Playx2' button. When I played back the animation at double speed, it all seemed to work.
So... one thing about the visuals for the LEGO Movie is that instead of just being yet another CGI film, it used CGI to emulate stop-motion. Normally, when you try to use CGI to "replace" something in real life it can look a bit off, but LEGO as a medium makes it super easy to pull of as untextured plastic is practically the easiest material to render photorealistically. The bump mapping complicates things a little but it's not the same as trying to render skin.
Slight misconception there. They put a huuuge amount of work into the raytracing used for the subsurface scattering used on the plastic (Subsurface scattering being the light that passes through the material, same issue with skin on flesh). This along with reflections, fingerprints (that go across multiple models), dust/hair, and 10s of millions of polygons per frame, made them realise no normal photorealistic renderer would work.
So, in fact, the technical director had to develop a new photorealistic renderer to meet their demands of insane detail with light and geometry. That technical director, Max Liani, was actually so good that he's now the Principle Engineer of Raytracing at Nvidia.
@@HeyJD123
Not really a misconception. Plastic's still easier to render than most other materials, even with raytracing involved, and even with the additional textures to add fingerprints and the like. At the end of the day, plastic's a smooth and typically semi-reflective material, so even if you have tons of stuff in a scene the calculations are relatively easy by comparison.
The big thing here is the 10s of millions of polygons. That requires either a ton of system resources or an extremely efficient rendering engine and a still very large but comparatively smaller amount of system resources.
By any chance is the rendering engine you're referring to nVidia Iray? Because I have some experience with it myself.
@@VestedUTuber Animal Logic used something they were developing in-house called Glimpse.
The fact that into the spiderverse’s Lego part was done by a 14yr old too is wild
*across
But yeah! I even knew him from when he started his channel! It's pretty cool and I'm happy for him. He's livin' the dream.
@@SuperRamtin🤨
2:03 the lego movie honestly had the highest form of comedy
It's INSANE how the studio who made the Lego movie still had to rely on LDD instead of getting access to official 3d models directly by the Lego Group!
I think using LDD was a conscious choice by the director, not a restriction placed by Lego Group.
also they used a special "hollywood" edition of LDD if you look closely at the title bar in 4:16
@@Rot8erConeX what is the difference? I don't even know what LDD is tbh
LDD is officially lego. Probably so much easier to prototype and build sets in LDD instead of 3D software
You can choose to fight a medium or you can embrace it.
Lego as a film medium has so many limitations, and every CG Lego film up to this point choose to pretend every single limitation didn’t exist.
7:14 They absolutely succeeded. I have seen the movie so many times I've lost counts, but I can say it all verbatim while watching it, and now I can't even watch it without a tub of Lego to build and play while the movie goes.
5:02 "every movment is one that could realistically be made by lego pieces" . Shows scene where lego figure bends backwards over 90 degrees when in reality roughly 70 is the limit
My favorite part of this movie - and you can see it at 5:16 - is the way they use Lego bricks to create smear frames. It would have been so easy to just make normal smears, since you don’t even see it long enough to really notice in theater, and yet it’s so incredible that they put in the effort to use bricks to make them.
Ohh yeaaa
1:02 I’ve found a new source of nightmare fuel lmao
The more I learn about this movie, the more bitter I get that this wasn’t nominated for Best Animated Feature.
And I was already pretty bitter to begin with.
I do love Laika and The Boxtrolls, but man, did this film deserve its spot if we really must limit the nominations to 5 entries.
It did get a Best Song nomination at least.
God, the Boxtrolls was a staple of my childhood
It was, and still is, infuriating they did not get the credit they deserved at the Oscars. It's one the most visually stunning animation movies of the pas 25 years.
I was honestly amazed when the movie came out. I never expected anyone could make a LEGO movie that takes the feeling of playing with LEGO and runs with it, but those guys really did it. It had all the nostalgia, the childish excitement and wild imagination a movie like this should've had. And it did everything without making fun of the actual LEGO fans - something a lot of other movies based on toys or cartoons repeatedly fail to do.
Absolutely love the movie to bits.
This is my number one favorite animated film. Fun Fact: Lord and Miller also worked on the Spider Verse movies.
I knew that.
I think the achievement is more in the artistic use of technology rather than a flat-out technological breakthrough. So much of what makes good CG good, comes more from art direction than the actual technology being used.
Oh the nostalgia. I love this movie just as much as I did when I was a kid
Me too and I was actually a teenager already when this was made.
Liam Neeson & Will Arnett were fucking hilarious in that movie. Comedy GOLD
Agreed. The scene where their characters first meet each is my favorite part and Liam Neeson was the best! His character Bad Cop was my favorite one.
I think that this is still one of the best movies of all time, from animation, heart, humor, i think that this movie is practically perfect
true that
It is literally perfect
As someone who grew up on the brickfilm genre and made quite a few stop motion animations myself the Lego movie felt like a return to form to the films that the community was making at home.
The Lego Movie was insane. It was a moving story about religion, generational trauma, family dynamics, romance in the eyes of kids, and being unique even without being some special chosen one! And also sentient legos.
Remember seeing this when it came out, and for a second, I thought they had actually stop motioned the thing. Such amazing animation
6:33 It's been 9 years since this movie!?
The Lego Movie shows what Lego should be about and should be aiming for. Meanwhile we get more and more collectibles even in the playsets it is hard to find the parts to rebuild or create something new.
The Lego movie had all the potential to be a corporate product. It's still a miracle that something so groundbreaking and incredible could actually come to exist.
So true.
As a past brickfilmer, i really appreciated the effort put in the animation.
why dont you make brickfilms anymore?
I was a brickfilmer
I also like how can people turned the way they made the movie in maya and just made a capable way to made it in another program ( blender ) which give you the ability to create quit looking like the movie using some addon like ( mecabrick , epicfigrig , mecaface , mecalizer ) and ofc supporting the people who made it !
I liked how in lego dimensions characters from the lego movie and lego batman movie had animations reminiscent of the stop motion type thing they have in the movies, and everyone else is animated traditionally like rubber
on top of all this, the Lego movie was animated in a new rendering engine that has higher F stop options for the “camera” which created the incredible depth of field, detail, and allowed for amazing lighting all around
Lego Movie came out at a critical time for me. I was a teenager in high school, and it married my waning childhood passion for Lego with my growing appreciation for good filmmaking. This is just about the perfect Lego-themed movie you could ask for-one made with clear passion and understanding of what it’s like to be a child imagining a whole world and story in their head. They completely nailed the aesthetic too. It looks like this could have been fully stop-motion animated.
What I loved best about this movie is that it centers on how kids view their parents when they’re concerned about financial money troubles regarding their children using up their parents cash for their own self benefit, and the 10-year-old boy Finn who Emmet meets at the end of the movie as he enters the human world we discover remodeled the villain of the story Lord Business after his father. That’s the beauty of it. Both characters are played by Will Ferrell, and the animated counterpart of the boy’s father was just him kinda projecting his craving desire to build more sets in the basement but his father wouldn’t let him because the money he spent them on was leaving him broke with his own job so he restricted his son to play with the sets as punishment by gluing the pieces back in place so they couldn’t be moved when touched again. And it’s not until the end of the movie when President Business warms up to Emmett after he returns to the Lego world to save his friends that we see Finn do the same with his father, suggesting that he agreed to put his father’s money to good use making wiser decisions instead of for his own self benefit.
Even the second one covers similar underlining plot devices regarding brother and sister issues. I love how in both movies the real conflict is a family issue all along but they don’t show it until the very end and the only clue we get is the conflict the characters in the Lego universe are facing like judgement day or the apocalypse that awaits them. Such a neat metaphor made by the animators. I give praise to Warner Brothers animation studios for that! 😎👍👌
The thing with "Lego Movie" and other, even the ones made this year, Lego movies are that the "Lego Movie" was 100% made of bricks, while on all the other (movies and games) there is a lot of not lego elements. Also the animation of the faces is very good.
Lord and Miller are truly the animation pioneers of the 21st century
The fact that this movie even has lego smear frames is so good
I can't believe the Lego movie is almost ten years old...
I feel old.
This movie really pushed Lego to the next level and has not come down from it since.
I remember most of those clips of the lego animations prior to the lego movie. - Watched them ondemand on the lego tv channel. Miss those days!
It's shocking it took them this long to come up with making lego CGI look like this.
When I saw the Lego Movie in theaters, I swore it was stop motion, not CGI
The Lego Movie will forever be timeless.
Agreed!
Very good video but y’all missed out on one of the important parts, technology advancements that allowed for the level of detail (ACES color system) compared to other animations
I miss The LEGO Movies so much, I'm also thankful Lord and Miller are so heavily involved with the Spider-Verse movies
Same.
What's not to miss about it.
@@santiagolopez3909 ikr
I'm a year late to your comment, but I'm pretty sure it's on Netflix now.
That bombad bounty clip at the start brought back a lot of memories! I used to live that film
It's already 9 years old? I remember seeing it in the cinema.
Aww this was so much fun to watch and learn about! Thank you~
The Lego Movie is by far the best toy advertisement in the history of mankind
ONE OF THE BEST ANIMATED FILMS FROM WB ANIMATION SINCE IRON GIANT, and i wouldnt be surprised if the moment 7:30 became a reference for Mario movie when encountering a similar creature by saying hello
The Lego Movie never deviates from the physical limitations of the minifigs. Most others have a more free-form animation that ignores these limitations.
When this movie came out, it actually had me fooled thinking it was fully stop motion animated. They really captured the style of that genre of animation so well, including smaller details like lots of hard lighting and shallow depth of field, together with believable surface imperfections, low framerates and believable movements, everything just worked.
It’s because the creator wanted it to be more faithful to LEGO and how it actually moves.
So it all just comes down to previous movies being animated with “lego style” and the lego movie being animated having in mind it happens in the real world
How has it already been 9 years since this movie came out?
Why do you find that hard to believe. Anything is possible.
Me and my family thought this movie was actually stop motion when we first saw it so we had to look it up to find out its not
5:05 does this scene triggers other like it does for me? “Every movement is one that could be realistically made”
Something which nobody has mentioned yet is that The Lego Movie was rendered in ACES (I believe it was the first animated movie to use the engine) which allowed for a much higher dynamic range in the image. So the lighting is almost perfectly real, dark areas of the image are properly exposed and still show detail with contrast, and bright areas influence the rest of the scene, even as far as to calculate what that light would do in the lens of the simulated camera to give a real impression of lens-flare. Others have also mentioned that the simulation also runs in real Lego size, so close up shots simulate the depth of field of a real camera filming one of those classic brick animations.
That might be the last time I expected something to be terrible and it was actually great.
Slight niggle, they did cheat a bit here and there. You can see at 1:40 they give the shoulder joints more range, and they might even bend the elbows a bit, hard to tell. But that's okay, it doesn't break the illusion.
Now I wanna use PartDesigner and Blender to animate stuff. Maybe I can incorporate Rust to automate some stuff.
honestly i would imagine this movie would be one of the things that amazed a little kid who watched this and developed an interest in making lego films and now, is that 14yo who animated the lego section of across the spiderverse
Much like SpiderVerse, they were the work of a team who actually understood the medium.
this movie is practically as ingrained into my brain as my name is, i watched it so many times as a kid, maybe thats why i'm so creative and like to think outside the box, the lesson really stuck with me I guess.
They failed to mention the revolutionary colour space it used in order to look so realistic.
My absolute favorite animated movie of all time. Glad its animation is being praised here because it's so spectacular.
When referring to 2's and 3's and how it would be used latter, Spideyverse was shown; which Lord and Miller also did.
I'm still pissed this film didn't even get an Oscar nomination for "Best Animated Feature"
Stellar. Excellent video! I'd also like to note the use of REALLY shallow Depth of Field while rendering, simulating that of a real camera, shooting macro on such *tiny* little pieces. That REALLY helped to illustrate the scale, in a way that most might not notice! And the subsurface scattering of light, just like real plastics! The whole movie was such a visual treat!
💛
*_Everyone's Spaceman had a cracked helmet eventually._*
The lego movie also used an experimental extremely realistic lighting software that only a few movies used for cgi and stuff.
I had two classic space men, one blue, one red. They had the exact same rub-off of the logo on their torso and both their helmets were cracked exactly like Benny's. Although mine obv had no face left😂. To see this beat up and played with character brought to the screen tells you that these guys get it.
I don't know how this movie went past my radar, but it's cool to see the inspiration for stuff like recent Spider-Verse and Puss in Boots embracing the more creative approach to animation. Great video.
Warner Bros and Mojang need to take these techniques in to consideration and remake everything they already have on the Minecraft movie.
Thank you Lego Team and Nerdstalgic, lovely video and movie!!!!!
Who greenlit, animated, and saw that Lego Star Wars animation and said, "Yeah, that looks like a lego minifigure to me."
I made stop motion Lego movies for like 8 years and have never heard the term ‘brickfilm’ before.
Wait I thought this whole movie was stop motion? Dang and I really thought it was just as impressive
Yep. Everybody always thinks that at first.
1st time I watched, I truly wondered if it was stop-motion enhanced by CGI.
6:11 "One by one round bricks..." Studs, those are called studs.
"Even 9 years later [...]"
OH MY GOD IT'S ALREADY 9 YEARS? 💀
Definitely my favorite movie. This was so cool to hear!
I think the only content to come closest to the movie’s animation quality are certain Robot Chicken skits
It honestly was so simple to get something so good.
ive watched the movie 4 times and im not gonna stop untill they make part 3
In short, Lego Movie created: "Stopmotion but animated on a computer"
Actually, there *is* Motion Blur. Its just made with extra bricks! Freeze frames of the movie and you’ll see what they use to create the blurs.
This isn't really "motion blur" per se, but actually a different time-honoured animation technique - smear frames! You also see them used to good effect on the Spiderverse movies. When something is moving fast, the animators will do things like use a strangely distorted shape on a single frame to give an effect similar to motion blur, or sometimes have something shown in multiple places at the same time.
crazy
The interjected movie clips started to feel like watch mojo levels of bad in a few spots, mostly and often felt irrelevant. A shame because the actual analysis is very entertaining and informative!
So, you're saying that someone technically could recreate the whole Lego Movie without CGI.
It's also well worth watching in 3D precisely because of its animation. If you don't have a compatible bluray player, it is possible to play the 3D bluray disc in a PS4 and use a Playstation VR to watch the movie, like I did. I wish I knew more alternates to watch 3D Bluray discs, but I don't.