The Lego Movie
For this week's film club we watch The Lego Movie. What can I say, there are Legos in it, so I love it. I watched this movie when it came out in 2014 and honestly I thought it was made by using stop motion and very little VFX. The movies has a lot of little details that we would normally only see in normal life. Our course leader shared to us that this movies was fully Computer-generated imagery (CGI). This was such a interesting fact for me because in the movie you could see finger prints in the Legos, details of wear and tear, and even some pieces were broken for some reason. All these details tell anyone that this characters are real life Legos. Watching the movie again and knowing this information, got me to start thinking the level of detail that is necessary to make some movies. The film crew looked at many Lego pieces through a microscope to see every detail possible so they can transfer it to the movie. The producers really wanted to make this movie look as real as possible. Another thing that was pretty amazing for me to know is to know that every set in the movie, even though it was CGI, was built as if it was a real Lego. For example, they would not only built the outside of the house but they would also built the foundation and the inside of the house. In my opinion, it would be fun to make this movie because it is as if the animators were building Legos, but in a computer.
Furthermore I was wondering if it would be possible to remake this movie in real life. And the answer is yes, because it could be built but it would take approx. 15,080,330 Lego pieces to built the entire world and each scene. Also there are 3,863,484 unique Lego bricks.
Making this movie in real life wouldn't quite end exactly the same because there is something they made that is impossible to make in real stop motion, Blur motion. When using stop motion you don't have a smooth transition between movement and you don't have that blur that is created when, for example, you move your arm. Animators had to add some motion blur in the scenes to make it look smooth as if in real life characters.
Personally, I think animators did a good job in CGI because they didn't forget to add camera effects to make it look even more real. For example, they used depth of field in many shots. Also they use camera movements, as if there was a real camera in the shooting.
The Lego Movie is a perfect example of how a CGI movies can look like a real life movie.
