LEGO | Let's Make Awesome Stuntz

LEGO

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Let's Make Awesome Stuntz

May 2022

Free Range reunited with production company Highly Unlikely and director David Mellor to create this rollercoaster ride through the world of Lego City Stuntz. With a front to back mix of live-action VFX and fully CG shots, we were thrilled to take on the awesome challenge of showcasing every loop, jump, and crash to bring this exciting journey to life.

Methodology

In order to keep the shoot efficient and be able to control the performance of the toys, it was decided early on to rely on visual effects to augment, enhance, or create the action of specific shots. To sit seamlessly in the edit - and sometimes within the same shot - the rendered assets needed to perfectly match the real products captured in camera.

The 3D models were carefully animated in Maya to mimic every micro bounce and awkward speed wobble, remaining as authentic to the behavior of the real bikes as possible. Using Houdini and Redshift, we matched the on-set lighting and meticulously dialed the grunge, fingerprints, and subtle plastic flaws per shot.

To heighten the action and amplify the feelings of chaos and speed, virtual cameras were animated against the existing footage. When needed, compositors projected, stitched, and extended frames to make these changes totally invisible.

Action shots of the products that would be impossible to film, specifically close-ups inside the loops, were constructed entirely in post. We used scans of the environment and spherical HDRIs shot on set to recreate the environments and relied on a CG render for the foreground. To make sure these still felt as if they could have been shot, we referenced the lensing artifacts from macro Go Pro footage to help bring the final image together.

The Stadium

The visual style and camera language evolve as the spot transitions from real world toys into the LEGO City fantasy. Using FPV drone footage as inspiration, the fully CG sequence launches the audience on a fast and chaotic tour of the stadium show. The action was quickly prevised first to ensure that every twist and turn highlighted a specific product.

Creating the stadium world was a giant CG build with thousands of pieces that had to stand up to any possible camera position. We built a setup in Houdini which generated a low resolution representation of each LEGO brick, allowing us to quickly iterate the overall look and layout of the arena. At render time, these were switched to an instanced version of the high resolution bricks so that every camera angle captured the full model and texture detail of every little piece.

Lighting these scenes was also a unique challenge. The camera angles swirl and reverse around speeding subjects, which are being chased by animated spot lights in an environment with hundreds of visible light sources. Breaking the elements into separate lighting groups allowed us to dynamically control each source in Nuke after the images were rendered. This workflow meant we could keep rendering iterations efficient while still having the freedom to explore different directions and ultimately design the most compelling way to showcase these characters.

Credits

• Client
  LEGO
• Production Co
  Highly Unlikely
• Director
  David Mellor
• Color
  Maria Carretero
  @ Nice Shoes
• VFX
  Free Range
• VFX Supervisor
  David Hulin
• Creative Director
  Shayne Ryan
• CG Supervisor
  Greg White
• Animation
  Shayne Ryan, Nico Cappuccio,
  Ashley Williams
• Lighting
  Greg White, Wei-Ting Duo
• Compositing
  Euna Kho, Gigi Ng,
  Greg White
• FX
  Georgios Cherouvim