The LEGO Movie (1994 film)

The LEGO Movie
Title card
Directed by	Dent-de-Lion du Midi
Music by	Dent-de-Lion du Midi
Animation by	Claude Aebersold Alex Furer
Production company	Animagica Productions
Release date	26 August 1994 (1994-08-26)
Running time	4 minutes
Country	Switzerland
Language	English

The LEGO Movie is a 1994 Swiss animated short film produced by Animagica and directed by Dent-de-Lion du Midi. The film was developed by four artists over the course of over a year. It led to the creation of SPU-Darwin, and later LEGO video games as a whole.

Synopsis

The animation opens on a Blacktron base on Planet Lego IV. A Blacktron pilot lands his Star Rider spaceship and is given a device he uses to disassemble his spaceship and suck the pieces up. A danger alarm goes off, and an astronaut from a Radar Patrol gives the pilot a report on a Space Police Hunter ship. The pilot takes off with a jet-pack, followed by a swarm of Blacktron ships. The film cuts to the Space Police fleet, where an officer in one of the Commando ships is being spied on by the Blacktron pilot. The officer switches his monitor between different scenes: the exterior of another Commando ship, a Blacktron Intruder Force ship, a news report by "Larry Lego" of the Spyrius base being attacked by a robot, and finally an asteroid field. The jet-pack pilot appears floating in the asteroid field before transforming into a Star Rider and flying away.

The short film is structured like a film trailer for a non-existent feature film. The film opens with cast run listing fictional LEGO actors supposedly in the film, such as "Arnold Lego" and "Tom Duplo", alongside the production company and director. At the end is a billing block, featuring the same fictional actors but also crediting its animators.

Production

Development

The LEGO Movie was conceived by artist and "renaissance man" Dent-de-Lion "Dandi" du Midi, the film's director, along with 3D artist Claude Aebersold. The two first had met in the fall of 1991 when Aebersold, at the time an 18-year-old photography student working at a computer shop in Bern, helped deliver hardware to du Midi's studio in Beatenberg. A year later du Midi visited a new Apple store in Bern, Computer Studio, which Aebersold had switched to. Aebersold showed du Midi his 3D modeling projects, and the two became friends over their shared interests in computer technology and 3D graphics. Aebersold travelled to Beatenberg every few weeks to work on 3D animation projects with du Midi, and the two discussed potential projects while walking in the mountains of the Emmental Alps. One day during July 1993, du Midi and Aebersold discussed how 3D animation at the time looked like plastic, and what projects could be successful despite this limitation. Later after putting his son Frodo to bed, du Midi noticed the LEGO bricks in his son's toy basket and had an idea to create a LEGO movie for Frodo’s birthday in November 1994.

Du Midi and Aebersold were initially joined by Olivier Honauer, one of Aebersold’s friends. The team purchased a LEGO spaceship set and measured the dimensions of every LEGO piece in the set, as well as the assembled set. They then recreated each LEGO element from the set as a 3D model and reassembled the spaceship virtually. They created a test animation of the spaceship moving around in 3D space, which they found exciting (though Aebersold later said it "looked crummy" in retrospect). Honauer, realising that the project was becoming a major time investment, left the team and was replaced by Alex Furer, a graphic designer and roadie who had also met Aebersold at Computer Studio.

The LEGO Movie was originally supposed to be only a one-minute-long animation, but soon became more ambitious. The film was planned to follow a character named Johnny Lego going through the different LEGO themes at the time, including Space, Pirates, and Castle, as well as other environments that did not have official themes at the time, including desert and arctic. Only Space sets were ultimately used, and the animation ended up at nearly four minutes long.

Animation and editing

Space Police Commando art by Animagica

The three artists produced The LEGO Movie under the company name Animagica Ltd, also referred to as Animagica Productions. Aebersold and Furer each animated and composited about half of the film, while du Midi focused on project management and composing music for the film. The team originally worked at du Midi's studio, located on the ground floor of a chalet halfway up the Niederhorn. In spring 1994 the two animators moved their work into a two-room apartment in the village of Lanzenhäusern in Schwarzenburg, closer to Bern.

The film was created on Macintosh Quadra 950 computers with 64 MB of memory. The artists used StrataVision 3D for modeling and StrataStudio Pro for animation.

Video compositing, such as layers and titles, was done in Adobe Premiere; sequences were saved in the program's filmstrip format, which at the time only supported 75 images.

Special effects (such as blurring, depth of field, and lens flares) and retouching were done by hand for each frame in Adobe Photoshop (with a few effects also created in Gryphon Software's Morph). Furer later noted that they only used Photoshop because they did not know about Adobe After Effects, and software was often expensive and hard to obtain in Switzerland at the time. As the version of Photoshop they used could not load filmstrip files (and did not even support layers), the team had to copy each individual frame into Photoshop, edit it, and paste it back into the filmstrip. The process was recorded with QuicKeys so it could be automated.

The animators had no manuals for the software used and had to learn them through experience.

Du Midi wanted the film to use high-quality ray traced images, leading to long render times, in some cases up to two days for a single frame. Once a frame was rendered, loading it into Photoshop could take as long as 45 minutes. Even loading scene files into StrataStudio could take 45 minutes, and the files opened at the beginning of the scene, and it took another 45 minutes up to an hour to advance the timeline to where the animators needed to continue working. At one point Furer thought the project was over when the scene he had worked on the day before seemingly would not open for an hour and a half.

While the computers were working, the three artists took breaks outside viewing the Alps above them and Lake Thun below, sometimes seeing Swiss Air Force jets practicing over the lake. After moving their work to Lanzenhäusern, the two animators went on long walks in the countryside.

The shot moving through the Commando ship was heavily edited in Photoshop to obscure z-buffering issues

One major issue encountered during rendering was that StrataStudio had inaccurate z-buffering. This particularly affected the shot where the camera moves through the inside of the Space Police Commando ship. The initial render of this shot had severe flickering and noise, resulting in it being unusable; du Midi was able to repurpose it as the in-film static on the Commando's computer monitor. The shot continued to have flickering issues, however, and the animators were unable to eliminate the issue through altering the camera's near/far distance settings. They ended up painting over the entire sequence in Photoshop, giving the scene a fisheye lens look to obscure any issues and adding a HUD with humorous messages.

They finished the film around September or October 1994, in time for Frodo's birthday.

External links

• The LEGO Movie on Vimeo