For Simon Lucas, nothing is more important than the integrity of the brick. As senior creative director at LEGO, Lucas marshals the company's wealth of products and films, ensuring that everything looks and behaves exactly as it should. Following the double-whammy success of The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Batman Movie, he's hoping that The LEGO Ninjago Movie, released on October 13, will give the company a cinematic hat-trick. The latest LEGO film is an evolution of the TV series that Lucas has overseen since 2012, but now with added Jackie Chan. WIRED sat down with Lucas to find out how bricks and pixels share the same DNA.
Why do you think the visual style of LEGO films has been so well received?
For an older audience there's something nostalgic. A lot of people have grown up with LEGO. And somehow jokes are taken to a whole other level when you see them brought to life in LEGO. When we develop these movies, we see storyboards and maybe the joke is funny. As soon as it's animated into LEGO though, it just takes on a new charm. Everything in the first movie is LEGO. If you had all the bricks in the world you could recreate that movie. We do it digitally, obviously, but that's the promise - that this is all real LEGO. That remains true in The LEGO Ninjago Movie too.
How do you ensure that everything that appears in the films stays true to LEGO's heritage?
It's so important that it's not product placement. We have a really strong collaboration to figure out what makes sense from a story point of view. The film-makers wanted to open the movie with the ninja not being so ninja, using technology, mechs and machinery to save the city. So we started to think about what the mechs and machinery looked like. We invited the director and production designer to Denmark and spent a week doing what we call a design boost. We got several LEGO designers together and asked them: "We know that Kai needs a fire-mech in the scene - what does that look like? What's the functionality?"And then we sketched in the LEGO bricks.
Read more: The new LEGO House is the ultimate homage to the brick
Do you tell film-makers what they can and cannot do?
We have a lot of technical rules. We want it to look like it's real LEGO, so we'll provide a studio with the design of how it will look if we did it. We have lots of adult LEGO fans as well and they pick up on the details. They will know if you can't print that way on a brick. I like to think that everything in the movies is buildable. The Ninjago City play set has 4,867 pieces.
How accurately does it reflect what's in the film?
Ninjago City in the movie is huge. If we counted the bricks, we'd be talking millions. You can't do a set that big. So we thought it would be fun to do a slice of Ninjago City, the best bits in one big model. Because there's so much detail on-screen, it's pushed us in a great way. When I look at all the toys for the movie, the detail, the size, the build complexity - it's a whole other level of awesomeness.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
