Behind The Moving Image | LEGO’s fantastical creatures are ‘having a good time’

LEGO wanted to celebrate the magic and creativity of a child's imagination during the holiday season, while showcasing their famous blocks that transform into different creations from star destroyers to fire engines. Our VFX team talk us through all the fantastical scenarios and how they created them…

Work February 1, 2022

The festive spot is backed by a reimagined version of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, and The Mill/MPC’s award-winning visual effects that transport viewers on a journey of fantastical creatures, LEGO constructed vehicles and cities in an enchanted world that brings people together. Combined with The Mill/MPC’s colour grade magic, ‘Holiday’ explodes with the vibrant imagination true to LEGO’s philosophy.

Firefighting Dragon

Our Head of Creature Development, Fabian Frank said “The main brief was to create a firefighting hero dragon that wouldn’t spit fire but water – a design and build that was art directed and led by our concept team”.

The dragon can be seen flying above a castle, a full CG build and environment which was challenging. Shooting on location was not an option, so the teams created a castle based on Bodiam Castle in England, surveyed the location and gathered photogrammetry data to aid the build. The landscape was entirely designed by our environment team as it had to tie in with the principal location in Poland.

Racetrack

This was a very technically challenging sequence, as we follow a racecar from the track into becoming a carriage of a ferris wheel, while in a time-lapse from day to night. With this, the environment changes so our teams decided to use full CGI to seamlessly transition this scene and have full control over light and animation – while the cars would drive in real-time.

Fabian added “After matching the on-set lighting perfectly to make a transition seamless we combined stock-footage skies and multiple environment maps to create the illusion of a time-lapse sky while the foreground hero elements were entirely CGI.”

Racing Princess

In this sequence we follow a princess in her supersonic race car through a full CG salt flat desert. Due to schedule limits, this had to be shot on greenscreen, the full CG car and environment was added in post, with the design of the racer was based on LEGO’s version of Disney’s Cinderella carriage. The location is loosely based on Utah’s salt flats but entirely art directed and designed by our environment team. We used satellite data to create a base for the mountain ranges which were then altered with procedural noises and erosion simulations.