This is an official Lego short film from 2010.
Introducing the double-decker couch.
So everyone could watch TV together and be buddies.
And this is The Lego Movie that came out just four years later.
The differences in quality are immediately obvious.
No movie, Lego or not, had ever looked quite like this one.
It permanently redefined how other Lego media is created.
It helped bring the brand back to full financial power.
While your first instinct might be
to attribute this impact to the movie's humor or its heart,
The LEGO Movie's true legacy will always
be the technological feats it achieved through animation.
That's great.
You can't do anything better.
There's no reason why you should move.
You-- aw, you just moved and you just wrecked it.
Uh huh.
You wrecked it!
Before we break down exactly why The Lego Movie looks
the way it does, make sure you subscribe to Nerdstalgic
so you don't miss out on our most recent video releases.
Official Lego movies, shorts, and video game cinematics
had a very distinct look before 2014.
At a glance, you can see that these were clearly
meant to evoke the idea of Lego bricks and toys.
You've got the iconic C-shaped hands, real Lego accessories,
and playsets being used as props,
and actual Lego pieces scattered around various seats.
On closer inspection, however, things don't feel quite right.
The textures are smooth, the facial expressions are uncanny,
and the animation is overly fluid.
It's as if these LEGO figurines are
made of flexible rubber instead of hard plastic.
In a way, this makes sense.
Why would you constrict yourself to the rigid and limiting
movements of a real Lego when the limitless possibilities
of animation are at your fingertips?
This is literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard.,
Please, Wyldstyle, let me handle this.
That idea is just the worst.
Well, Lego content is typically made for children, after all,
and so it seems reasonable to copy
the more popular 3D animation styles found
in other children's media.
This method of thinking permeated Lego animation
projects beginning with the 2001 Jack Stone
short, until The Lego Movie made its debut.
To the Batmobile!
Dang it!
To The Invisible Jet!
Dang it.
Everyone who has seen even a single frame from The Lego
Movie understands what kind of film it is.
Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller,
who are best known for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
and 21 Jump Street at the time, have
said that their goal was to--
Take a very homemade brickfilm and try
and make that as cinematic as possible with lighting
and camera angles and the type of things
that you would do on a big budget live action movie.
With the help of an incredible team of animators
at Animal Logic, led by Chris McKay and Aidan sarsfield,
they definitely achieved that goal.
In that quote from Lord and Miller,
you might have noticed the use of the word brickfilm.
The term is used among LEGO hobbyists
to describe fan-made movies that use Lego characters
and sets to tell their stories.
Traditionally, these tend to be stop motion-animated,
and it's where the idea of Lego movies
originally began to take hold.
Decades before Lego had even considered
making their video content, fans were creating their own.
If anybody has blackboards, I need them, OK?
I only work in black--
and sometimes very, very dark gray.
As is pointed out in this Vox documentary,
brickfilms were a definite inspiration
for the official Lego Movie.
There are a number of direct nods
to these early fan works in the film.
The choppy animation style is meant
to replicate traditional stop motion
even though it's almost entirely computer-generated.
The magic portal Finn plays with is
named after one of the most well-known brickfilms ever
created.
And a scene in the movie even plays snippets
of fan-submitted shorts.
But there's another major influence
that amateur brickfilms had over The Lego Movie,
and it can be distilled down to its most basic elements--
creativity and imaginative play.
That's what truly fueled The Lego Movie.
That's the driving force behind the toy it's based on,
the theme of its story, and the reason it looks so awesome.
You are the most important and most extraordinary person.
That's you, right?
Uhh, yes.
That's me.
Essentially, everything you see on screen
is constructed by digital representations of real Lego
bricks.
Actual Lego models were often built during production
so that Lord and Miller could see them up close
and give feedback.
The animators used a free brick-building software, Lego
Digital Designer, to create assets,
and then recreated them in Maya, a 3D graphics program,
in order to animate them.
We built a system that really utilizes real Lego bricks.
All of the things that you see on screen are 100% Lego blocks.
That means that practically everything
you see in every frame of The Lego Movie
can actually be built by someone in the real world.
The movie also follows the laws of stop motion animation
Wait, what did he just say?
It was animated on twos and threes.
Meaning instead of having fluid motion
for 24 frames per second, they only
animated 12 or as few as 8 frames,
a technique that would be used by other studios
to great success in later years.
Animal Logic also decided to omit any kind of motion blur,
lending an even greater sense of realism to the effect.
And of course, every movement is one that could realistically
be made by Lego pieces.
Jumping Jacks, hit them!
1, 2, 3--
I am so pumped up!
However, since this was all done through CG animation,
the details could be pushed even further.
Some pieces, particularly the figurines
of the main characters, have visible scratches,
fingerprints, and cracks.
There are creases where you would see them
on pieces made with real life molds,
little imperfections in the plastic,
and differences in texture.
Look no further than the well-loved 1980s-era spaceman,
Benny, who is based off of Miller's childhood toy.
Spaceship!
This level of real detail had never really
been considered in previous Lego projects
with their almost unnervingly smooth 3D models.
When combined with everything else,
it all made for a highly stylized and incredibly
beautiful film.
What I see are people inspired by each other.
People taking what you made and making something new out of it.
Even just the intro when Emmet is getting ready for his day
is almost overwhelming in its detail.
When Emmet showers, one-by-one round bricks
come out of the showerhead and froth up
to actual LEGO bubbles.
Stunning effects like the interior of the magical portal,
smoke and steam, explosions, and even massive ocean waves
are all made from thousands of individually rendered bits
of Lego, and they're all animated to look like they're
moving in stop motion.
It's a stunning technological achievement that
had never been done before.
Even nine years later, it still holds up it holds up.
So well that several more Lego movies and shorts
have been made since then which emulate the iconic style,
and in that time, it's become synonymous with the Lego brand.
I think I got it, but just in case,
tell me the whole thing again, I wasn't listening.
Ugh!
None of this would have been possible
without those basic elements of creativity and imaginative play
on the part of the movie's creators.
It took a lot to make-believe and forging new creative paths
to make The Lego Movie look the way it does.
And it was done to stay as true to the core of Lego
as possible.
The Lego Movie is about as close as you
can get to playing with Lego without actually pulling out
the pieces.
Nobody said it better than the directors.
Our dream was that you would turn the movie off and then
run home and then build the most silly ridiculous Lego thing
you could.
Lord and Miller and the animators at Animal Logic
pushed creative boundaries with The Lego Movie.
They let their imaginations run wild and created something that
inspired play through sheer aesthetics, everything
from the stop motion-like animation style
that pays tributes to its early inspirations
to the individual bricks that make up
every frame of the movie to the fingerprints on Emmet's helmet
hair were done with purpose.
And, well, that's all we have for you today.
If you made it all the way to the end,
we'd like to thank you, and we also
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See you next time.
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