Bringing Mojang’s beloved blocky sandbox videogame to the big screen posed a wide range of creative and technical challenges for Sony Pictures Imageworks. In this in-depth conversation, VFX Supervisor Seth Maury breaks down the studio’s work on Jared Hess’ hit The comedy adventure from Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures stars Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Hansen, Jason Momoa, Jennifer Coolidge, and Emma Myers. Hess directs; Roy Lee, Jon Berg, Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Momoa, Jill Messick, Torfi Frans Ólafsson and Vu Bui produce, with Todd Hallowell, Jay Ashenfelter, Kayleen Walters, Brian Mendoza and Jon Spaihts serving as executive producers. Oscar winner Dan Lemmon serves as the production VFX supervisor. The film is based on the hugely popular game Minecraft, first released by Sweden’s Mojang Studios in 2011 and purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014, which, immerses players in a low-res, pixelated “sandbox” simulation where they can use blocks to build entire worlds.  Here's the final trailer: The studio handled environments and character animation for a number of key scenes in the movie, including Welcome to Midport Village, the attack on Midport Village, the Elytra wingsuit canyon chase, the diamond mines, Woodland Mansion – including the zombie baby atop a chicken fight and Endermen showdown. They also handled the Nitwit work where Jennifer Coolidge’s Vice Principal Marlene hit a Nitwit with her car… the romantic dinner they shared afterwards, and the scene in her office. “In the diamond mines, Garrett wants to take a bit of a detour because he wants to sneak some diamonds into his pocket as he needs the money,” Maury says. “Then the piglins chase him through the mine very briefly. We also did the creeper farm stuff where the big Great Hog and some piglins were chasing Henry, Garrett and Steve before it all blows up.” Maury says that the production relied on a combination of boards, previs, stuntvis, and live-action plates to build sequences. One example is the wingsuit chase. “They had boarded it, prevised it, then shot it based on the previs,” he explains. “They had Jack and Jason and some stunt guys for stuff that was a little more problematic physically to do. They shot plates for all of that.” Imageworks took those plates and roughed out the animation. “We were basically mocking up or doing postvis for those shots… moving cameras through the environments with those plates so that we had something that was more representative of what the final shots were going to look like.” While not fully animated at that stage, the postvis helped inform the cut. Maury notes, “It’s so rough that it’s not like, ‘Oh look at all the time I spent animating this character.’ It was like, ‘Hey look, we got this working so that you could say it’s moving through the environment in a real way.’” The goal was to create animation-ready sequences that could maintain spatial consistency. “You don’t want the actors going 500 kilometers an hour here and now going 20 kilometers an hour over there,” Maury elaborates. “Why does this feel weird? Because the clouds are suddenly blurry on one and not in the other.” To help populate complex sequences, Imageworks used motion capture for background animation - especially for piglins during the village raid. “We were lucky to have Derek Tannahill as a supervisor on the show,” Maury says. “He had access to the mocap suit. So a lot of the piglins in the background are actually Derek. A lot of the villagers are actually Derek too.” Maury adds, “I think there were three pigs that were kind of medium-sized, which would be the closest to a human. There were three smaller ones and three that were a little bit bigger. And then there was a couple that were just really, really, really big.” Rather than guessing what would be needed later, they mocapped a wide batch of piglin behaviors in advance, like “Do one as a heavy pig, do one as a light pig, do one as a twitchy pig, do one as, you know, a really, really frantic pig.” Those were then applied to characters of different sizes to keep variation high and repetition low. “If you’ve got a guy swinging his arm, then another guy swinging his arm in the exact same way, it’s obvious,” he says. “So even if we had a great take, we didn’t want to overuse it.” For stunt-heavy scenes like the Midport piglin raid, the production had actors perform full choreography ahead of filming. According to Maury, “They shot the whole thing with stunt actors in a fake version of the set at the proper scale and size. It was really great. So when they actually shot the sequence itself on set with the real actors, we had that choreography to work from.” Maury says they focused on matching the stunt choreography with CG characters. “If the stunt actors did something that looked great, there’s no need to replace them. We just needed to find a way to get the piglins to fit in the same space.” Of course, blocky piglin characters take up more room than humans. “If you’ve got two humans side by side and then you put in a piglin that’s twice as wide, sometimes you had to copy the performance but move them over so that they would fit,” he says. “It’s like trying to put a bunch of cars on an elevator - they're so big they can’t fit in that space. So, you copy the motion, but sometimes you have to shift them over a bit to make it work.” Maury continues, “Those shots were pretty straightforward in the sense that they had practical actors in those costumes, right? So, we were doing head replacements on those characters because those costumes were quite large. You didn't put a little tiny Beetlejuice head on this big body. But, there's not a lot of guesswork in there as far as what needs to go into the shot. It's put the heads on the characters and then if they want more characters in the background, you add them in the same kind of style as they are in the practical costumes.” The infamous Garrett - baby zombie fight atop a chicken drew attention from early trailers - and required a very specific approach. “That was all keyframe animation except for the characters outside,” Maury says. “You can’t mocap a baby with really, really short limbs and a giant head riding a chicken.” Still, the production had live-action reference. “They shot this sequence again with the stuntvis team,” Maury explains, “then boarded it, shot it as best they could with the actors and stunt performers they had, and then gave us plates.” Using that as a base, the team refined it for animation. He adds, “It was just a lot of keyframe work. You look at it and go, ‘Okay, what’s the funniest, silliest thing that we can have in here?’” Creating motion that felt faithful to the game’s aesthetic while viewable on screen required experimentation. “For example,” he says, “trying to get the Great Hog to move in a way that felt aggressive… it didn’t have the body structure to move fast. That was a bit of an experiment.” The Endermen posed similar challenges. “In the game, they’re very static,” Maury notes. “They don’t bend their legs. So, there was a lot of back and forth. Do the limbs bend? Do they not bend? Do we have them take real steps?” Maury goes on to explain that character proportions created their own physical logic. “Imagine my head is this big [he gestures]. If I turn that too fast, it’s not going to feel like it weighs 40 kilograms. It’s going to feel like Styrofoam. So, we slowed stuff down.” These kinds of adjustments helped translate the game’s visual shorthand into something legible on film. Maury and his team had to figure out how to get needed weight and feel without the characters seeming too stiff. In the game, they slide almost like chess pieces. A number of characters, particularly villagers, were shot in partial costume and composited later. “They had their arms like this, with blocky stuff on them,” Maury gestures again. “We were doing head replacements because the costumes were quite large.” In some cases, the studio extended background crowds digitally. “They might have only had six costumes available for any given shot,” he continues. “If they wanted more characters, we’d add them in the same style in CG. That’s not overly complex - you’re populating a background to feel natural.” He goes on to say that all animals were fully CG. “There wasn’t anyone in an animal costume. They were added in after.” With so many characters and objects flying through the air, matching the logic of physical motion was essential. If cameras show characters flying past things really fast and then stop on a dime, they start to feel fake. “We tried to keep the camera behaving with the same rules as the flying characters. It has to feel like it’s within the same physical constraints.” That required close coordination between layout and animation. “Our initial blocking passes for flying sequences really helped because we didn’t want to reinvent each one of those shots later.” Looking back, Maury says one of the most rewarding aspects of the show was the team itself. “It might have been the longest show I’ve worked on. But because of the timing - the streaming pullback, the strikes - a lot of VFX folks I hadn’t worked with in years became available. So, I ended up working with Derek and a bunch of leads and artists I already knew.” “It wasn’t just my department,” he continues. “It was lighting, comp. The show was really stacked. And I got to work with people I’d normally only see in the coffee line.” Maury also got to enjoy the film with his family. “It was the first time I went to the theater with my kids for something I worked on. They’re Minecraft fans. That was great.” As for the reception, he’s measured. “It’s a fun, silly film. And if you laugh at it because it’s silly, then great. But it’s not Shawshank Redemption. Why would someone review it like it was going to be? Sometimes you just want to go [to the movies] and have a good time.” Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.