00:09Buongiorno mondo, cominciamo la giornata, salti energizzanti, uno, due.
00:16Is playing with digital Lego bricks as fun as playing with the real ones?
00:22That's a good question.
00:24I think playing with any Lego brick is fun.
00:28The problem with real bricks is many times you can't afford all the bricks that you want.
00:32There are thousands of bricks in the Lego library, but what you can do is you can play with something
00:39called the Lego Digital Designer, or LDD, and we did on the film, and that gives you access to all
00:44the bricks in the library.
00:46You don't get to actually touch them, but you do get to click them together and you can make some
00:50pretty amazing things, and that's what our artists and modelers did.
00:53They used LDD to build the vehicles and the environments that we see in the film using this digital tool.
01:01It's free to anyone to download. It runs on multiple platforms, and when asking them, they said it felt like
01:08playing with Lego every day, but you didn't have to buy all the kits, so it was great.
01:24The special effects going more and more towards realism, how did it feel to put that goal aside and plunge
01:32into a world made of Legos?
01:36One of the things that I loved personally, and I had nothing to do with it, were the effects in
01:41the Lego movie, and by effects I mean the explosions, the water, the smoke.
01:47I loved that the directors and the art director decided that they were going to do all of the effects
01:53with Lego bricks.
01:54And it was the inventiveness of the effects team that I think was just remarkable.
02:00I used to sneak into their dailies and just watch them blowing stuff up because it was just fun to
02:04watch all these Lego pieces flying around.
02:08For me, early on, it was also the water they were doing, the pirate ship going through the sea of
02:15bricks and the wake of those bricks coming out.
02:18It was just so inventive and it was so creative and it didn't look like anything else that I'd worked
02:23on.
02:24Because so much of what we work on, we want to replicate real world effects, the real look of water,
02:32the real look of smoke.
02:33And this was taking a stylized Lego version of it and it was a lot of fun to be part
02:38of that.
02:43For the Lego movie, you created a variety of very different worlds. Which one was the most difficult to create
02:50and which one was the most fascinating?
02:53Wow, these are good questions.
02:56For the Lego movie, we did have to create a bunch of different environments.
03:00The story takes us from Bricksburg where Emmett grows up, we go to the Wild West and then we end
03:05up inside Emmett's brain at one point.
03:09And each one of the environments had a different challenge.
03:12For the Wild West, it was a huge challenge in terms of the number of bricks we needed there to
03:16create the canyons.
03:18So some very smart people at Animalogic created what we called Legoscape, which allowed us to create these buttes, these
03:26messes in the desert and the canyons that we go through.
03:31Early days on the film, it was close to impossible to render those, but some very other smart people came
03:38up with our own renderer.
03:40Actually Max Liani, who's Italian, wrote this renderer for us that could handle that.
03:45So the challenges of the big cities and the canyons were a technical challenge because of the number of bricks.
03:53Artistically, I know the art director in trying to come up with what does it look like in Emmett's brain.
03:59I know they went through some design iterations there to sort of say, well, what is this place where it's
04:05this void?
04:06The whole joke was that there's nothing in Emmett's brain, which makes him perfect to be the special.
04:10But how do you represent that visually?
04:13So I know that was an artistic challenge.
04:15Modeling was extremely simple.
04:17It was just planes of semi-transparent bricks, but from a conceptual idea it was quite difficult.
04:30How did you get to the very original style of animating the characters in the movie?
04:38For the animation, we embraced the stop-motion nature of the minifigs.
04:43Each minifig has only nine degrees of rotation.
04:46So they have arms that can rotate from the shoulder, for example, but they can't bend at the elbow.
04:52They can twist their wrists.
04:55Same with the legs, no knees.
04:57He can't bend the knees.
04:58He can only bend from the waist.
05:00So I know the animators struggled early on to get the kind of expressive performances out of those.
05:06characters, but we realized the limitations actually helped with the overall look and style of the film.
05:12And once we kind of cracked that and we understood how to create a variety of different walks and runs
05:18and give personality, individual personality, to our main heroes, Emmett and Lucy and Vitruvius and the others,
05:26it was then that we decided that this was actually a good thing.
05:31All of these restrictions actually were helping us craft a film that really looked like it had been created with
05:38actual plastic bricks.
05:44You worked on several projects concerning Star Wars, from the new trilogy to the series of the Clone Wars.
05:52Are you too involved in the new project by Abrams and what did you expect from the new movie?
06:00I was involved in the Star Wars prequels.
06:02I was the animation director on those films.
06:04And then I did spend some time in the Clone Wars.
06:07I started off as a fan of Star Wars.
06:09So when I was 13, the original trilogy started to come out.
06:14So in 1977 and then Empire Strikes Back in 80 and then Return of the Jedi.
06:21See, I'm getting all confused.
06:23Those films I was a fan and I loved going to those films and being swept away into those worlds.
06:29That's going to be the case for me, J.J. Abrams.
06:32I have nothing to do with the new Star Wars films.
06:35I spent a lot of time on Star Wars, close to 10 years or maybe slightly more, working on Star
06:40Wars.
06:40And I loved that time, but I'm also very happy to be doing things like the Lego movie now,
06:44which allows me to stretch my creativity in other ways.
06:48So when J.J.'s film Star Wars 7 comes out, I'll be lining up and buying one of the early
06:54tickets
06:54as a Star Wars fan and sitting in the audience and just watching the amazing creativity
06:59that I know that he and his team will bring to the film.
07:19I know that he's at the top of the film.
07:20He's my favorite DJ in the game.
07:20Now we're safe.
07:20I've had some time on Star Wars.
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