One of the key elements of the campaign was how to direct the rabbit and other characters so that their emotions and personalities supported the overall story and its fast rhythm. Augustin Paliard, Animator at Mikros MPC commented: “On this movie, the animation work has been dictated by three elements: storytelling, movements and rhythm. We had to always keep these in mind so the right intent was conveyed in every sequence.” The team worked to humanize the rabbit through styling of the fur to meet a high level of realism –notable in the chasing scenes.
The key technical challenge on the compositing was to blend the surrealist universe of LEGO, where we have flat colors and smooth textures, into a real world. There was a right balance to find so that viewers would still relate to a realistic environment.
Eric Lemains, Mikros MPC compositor
Creating the environment required extensive matte painting, compositing and the creation and addition of many CG elements such as the white rabbit, aerial chase, flames and a rotating head.
For the final element, Jean-Clement Soret, Global Creative Director of Color Grading at MPC was tapped to achieve the correct balance between the surreal and realism and the LEGO brand visual identity. Soret’s work was instrumental in making the short film vibrant without being too saturated so that it kept a realistic render. “The initial brief from Traktor was to maintain the overall color richness of the images and bring up or down saturations of individual colors to build a coherent and realistic palette. We built color settings for the visual effects team to visualize a close to final result, worked close to the VFX team all the way and finalized the fine details once post was completed, including finessing the integration of all various composited elements, some shots are 90% live action some are 100% CG all needed to be wrapped in a unique color space” says Soret.
