Click3X Lego Fun

Stop-motion photography and visual effects by Click 3X helped bring together Build Together, a :30 spot promoting the joys of LEGO construction. We take a look at how the commercial was created.

Click here for the Quicktime

The brief for Build Together centred around LEGO’s new online experience to share the building experience at home. The spot highlights some of the builds possible and is set as a Grand Canyon road trip between a father and son. “There are probably two types of LEGO spots,” said Click 3X producer Steve Holiner. “One is like this where you’re staying very true to the nature of the toy and then there’s the more video game CG style. In this one we wanted to shoot for an overall cinematic look – coming up with this Grand Canyon wall in the background that gives you a great sense of the depth of field.”

Before any block building could commence, the studio began a previs process. “We got a rough animatic from the LEGO guys that gave us a general idea of the action,” said Click 3X creative director and Flame artist Mark Szumski. “Then we had our in-house storyboard artists re-design some of the shots, do camera blocking and some comedy gags.”

Lead 3D animator Spyro Serbos blocked out the previs in Maya, creating a basis for the camera moves to be realised in the stop-motion. That involved an eight-day shoot at the Click 3X studios in New York, led by stop-motion supervisor and animator Eileen Kohlhepp. Eight scenes were filmed using a motion-control rig and a Canon 5D.

“The studio is actually only 20 feet away from my Flame suite,” noted Szumski. “So we were able to very easily ingest 5K RAW files from the Canon into the Flame and convert them into OpenEXR files. I’d convert them down to 2K unless we were doing a post move or post zoom on the shot.”

The scene featuring the souvenir stand and some other environments were realised as reverse builds. “What this means is we’d have the sets already constructed and then the hand models would be taking apart the blocks,” said Szumski. “We would arrange that shot in reverse and then play it forward later to make it look like it was building on its own.”

The shots were pieced together quickly in the Flame, so that Szumski could review each take and do rough comps from background passes and passes for the character animation. Some final shots ended up relying on split screens for alternative animation takes. “A couple of the scenes in the car are actually split screens,” said Szumski, “with the father being one take on one side and a different take of the son on the other.”

“We also did some greenscreen shooting of just hands,” continued Szumski. “A little girl’s hands actually became a little boy’s hands, and we also had an adult hand model. We filmed them in multiple perspectives and with different lighting to get a tool kit of views. It gave me different hands that I could drop into various comps later.” Click 3X used Kronos, ReelSmart Motion Blur and some traditional directional blur for the hands, and carried out re-trouching and rig removal in Nuke.

Some CG was required for the spot to help add some additional action and details. “The human faces were animated from textures in After Effects which we loaded into Maya, said Szumski. “Then we created the mini heads and composited them onto the LEGO heads in the scene. And the buzzard that pulls off the hair and flies away is completely CG, but we maintained that blocky LEGO look.”

Extensive colour correction also helped preserve the traditional LEGO feel. “Although we used a lot of bricks, there was still quite a limited colour palette,” said Szumski. “It was basically just five colours that we had to choose from to make this desert canyon environment look real. But once we built the desert and Grand Canyon environment, it kind of looked a little simplistic and washed out. So we did a lot of colour correction in Flame to give it atmosphere and layers and detail. We had to be mindful of not changing the brand or the almost cubism kind of tactile charm that Lego is associated with.”

Keeping everything ‘brick-based’ was central to Click 3X’s approach to the spot. “At the first meeting,” recalled Szumski, “the LEGO people showed us this traditional fan-made stop motion stuff and other spots they had done. Then they also showed us the CGI stuff for brands like Star Wars. I wanted to take the dynamic shots and more sweeping camera moves from those and apply that to the more tactile feel of stop-motion.”

“One thing I particularly liked,” added Steve Holiner, “was that you have very little movement of the arms and the legs. The boys legs are literally a solid block, so we had to try and create all the personality within that LEGO world.”

Credits

Spot Title: Build Together
Air Date: November 2010

Agency: LEGO In-House Agency
CD: Keith Malone
Creative Manager: Roger Cameron
Lead AD/New Media: Scott Decoteau
Account Manager: Jordyn Curtis
Model Designer: Paul Chrzan
Marketing Director: Ethan Sack
Assistant Brand Manager: Patrick O’Neil

Prod/Post Co: Click 3X
Creative Director/Flame Artist: Mark Szumski
Director/ DP: Peter Corbett
EP: Jason Mayo
Producer: Steve Holiner
Line Producer: Rob Mackler
Stop Motion Supervisor/Animator: Eileen Kohlhepp
Stop Motion Rigger/Assistant: Elise Ferguson
3D Animator: Spyro Serbos
Nuke/Flame Artist: Liz Berndt
After Effects/CGI: Mark Rubbo

Online Ad Units: ClickFire Media
Senior Interactive Producer: Ephraim Kehlmann

3 thoughts on “Click3X Lego Fun”

  1. Love the spot and blog post, but wish they would’ve removed the pulldown or field merged before posting online.

  2. Yeah we were a tad disappointed with the pulldown – so Click3X is getting us a new version ASAP

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