Also, the directors would sometimes ask for background action or scenery to be more sharply in focus to help sell a gag or to highlight some of the funny secondary animation that our superb team of animators had created.įloating motes of dust were also used as a nod to the real world but also to help the sense of scale. Part of finding a sense of the "epic" sometimes involved deepening the DOF (bearing in mind that Layout was setting the DOF without the benefit of fully shaded and lit renders). The DOF that Layout set was treated as "intent", but occasionally we would alter it as we observed how it worked with the lighting. With such a generally shallow depth of field it was found that overshooting DOF led to popping and was distracting, so the focus pulls were carefully and accurately done (sometimes frame by frame for very close camera work), but overshoots on camera moves were retained.ĭepth of field was set in Layout, and we inherited those DOF settings via the pipeline in Lighting, but DOF was ultimately implemented in our compositing stage. imperfections were explored, such as deliberate overshoot of focus pulls and camera moves.a sense of weight and inertia was keyframed into the camera movement, again to seat the camerawork in the "real world" of the Lego sets, giving the audience the sense that the virtual camera had actual mass.This allowed for more "human" camera movement without the artificial perfection of normal CG camera work. rather than allow the CG camera to pivot on a nodal point, rigs were built to emulate real-world camera rigs such as Steadicam rigs, albeit at a Lego minifig scale.as a general principle the point of focus aligned with the stereoscopic convergence point, which resolved the tension between the audience desire to rove their eyes around the frame in a stereo image and the need to guide the audience to action or story points.DOF is accurate to the physics of those virtual lenses.lens as though at Lego scale using virtual lenses that are proxies to real-world equivalents.Pablo articulates the process pretty thoroughly in this interview on fxguidetv, the salient points being: Partly this was achieved through a generally shallow depth of field, coupled with camera work led by cinematographer and Layout Supervisor Pablo Plaisted which strove to emulate a camera operated at a Lego scale. Photographic considerations - Depth of Field, lens breathing, chromatic aberration, anamorphic distortion, caustics, subsurface scatter, atmospherics, dust motesĪs mentioned above, we had to balance the simulation of a miniature world with a sense of the epic, while also allowing for intimacy at appropriate moments. Light in a Lego World - How can we make people believe that this Lego world was actually constructed from real plastic bricks and photographed? How does light of various intensities and hardness react with Lego? What about coloured light?.Emotion - how can we enhance the drama of the film, given that our characters have cylindrical heads that are simpler in their response to light than human heads, and lack the emotional focal point of the human face, the eyes (minifig dots scarcely count as eyes in the photographic sense).Scale - how miniature should the world feel? Can we retain a sense of the epic while evoking the tiny?.So to represent Lego photorealistically via computer graphics is most unforgiving - the slightest mistake will just look wrong, and almost everyone will react to the mistake, even if they could not articulate what was wrong about the image they were viewing. We "know" what it looks like - how it reacts to different lighting conditions, the patina of its surface, the way light transmits through it. Pretty much everyone is familiar with Lego. Let's leave aside the technical considerations (the subject of a future article) and consider the cinematographic challenges. I think we were all initially thinking "It's plastic - how hard can it be?" hard. "We want it to look as though it's all been made in someone's basement - someone with a lot of time on their hands - and then lit and photographed by an absolutely top-notch miniatures photographer." A word that sends a shiver down the spine of even the most seasoned CG veteran (perhaps especially so the more seasoned). The brief from the directors was clear: PHOTOREALISM.
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