Swinging through trees and city buildings alike, the LEGO Friends franchise meets the aliens in a romp around Legoland. Written and directed by Michael Black of Pure Imagination Studios, this 4D experience now playing at Legolands around the world is sure to ignite the child in everyone!
Pure Imagination’s move to streamline their production process by integrating Epic Games Unreal Engine had paid dividends with previous projects, including for LEGO Disney Princess, but this time round, there was an added element: stereo. How would they take advantage of Unreal’s real-time 3D creation tool to simplify and enhance the process. Michael Black, the movie’s writer/director, expands:
“I was excited to work on this show utilizing Unreal’s stereoscopic 3D workflow. We did an Unreal-produced stereoscopic last year, but our tools for stereo were still nascent and only promised what we’d be able to do on this one. Before, when our workflow was more Maya-based, the playblasts weren’t able to be viewed with color or lighting or often backgrounds and so a lot of theory and guesswork came into play and often there would be retakes after getting initial stereo comp renders as the theory didn’t always play out. But with the Unreal pipeline, we are able to view shots in near-final quality in realtime, adjust our separation, convergence and even adjust placement of elements and know exactly what we were going to get in the final output. It made everything so much smoother and faster and cut down significantly on retakes, effectively removing all of the theory. Building on that, I’m particularly excited for the next iteration of our stereo toolset, where we’ll be able to work on entire sequences (as opposed to shot by shot) and really get that refinement on a broader level from shot to shot and maximize the intensity of the stereo without people’s eyeballs going crossed or getting headaches with a level of control and flow we have only dreamed about so far. It’s very exciting.”
Milton Adamou was the colorist and finishing artist, working in stereo throughout to refine the pictures: “Our typical stereo colour workflow is to grade all the pictures in 2D and then do a 3D ‘trim’ pass to take into account the stereo environment and adjusted light levels”. Beyond the colour, there were a fair amount of finishing touches that also needed to be taken care of, specifically to do with Head Up Display (HUD) overlays showing a character’s point-of-view. Milton elaborates further: “The HUD overlays were brought in as separate elements and composited over the main picture. This meant that we were able to adjust the convergence of both the HUD overlays and the underlying ‘live’ material in Real-Time, negating an otherwise iterative process of trial and error. In addition to that, because the HUD was semi-transparent in certain areas, we needed to get the colour science right between the HUD (709) and the live action material (ACES), in order to avoid unsightly fringes and edge artifacts”.
LEGO Friends 4D will be rolling out worldwide at LEGOLAND parks this spring, as well as LEGO Discovery Centers across the U.S. in late spring/early summer.
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