A Minecraft Movie: Piotr Karwas (VFX Supervisor) & Elizabeth “Liz” Bernard (Animation Supervisor) – Digital Domain
Interviews
A Minecraft Movie: Piotr Karwas& Elizabeth “Liz” Bernard– Digital Domain
By Vincent Frei - 20/05/2025
With 20+ years in film and advertising, Piotr Karwas has supervised VFX for top directors including David Fincher and Tim Burton. His recent work includes The Electric State, Elevation, he’s here today to talk about the Digital Domain work on A Minecraft Movie.
After discussing The Electric State with us a few months ago, Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Bernard is back—this time to talk about her work on A Minecraft Movie.
How did you and Digital Domain get involved on this show?
Piotr Karwas: We were approached by the Warner Bros. VFX team as they were looking to bring on an additional vendor to help complete the remaining visual effects work. It was also an opportunity to be the best dad ever, since both of my kids are huge Minecraft fans.
How was the collaboration with Director Jared Hess and VFX Supervisor Dan Lemmon?
Piotr Karwas: I’ve known Dan Lemmon since our time working together at Digital Domain. We collaborated on several projects in the early 2000s, so it was a great opportunity to team up again. As for Jared, I’ve been a fan of his work ever since his first feature, Napoleon Dynamite. Years ago, I also had the chance to briefly work on his film Gentlemen Broncos.
The blend of Jared’s signature humor with the global phenomenon of Minecraft was simply too exciting to pass up. I knew I wanted to be involved. Although Digital Domain joined the project later in the production process, we quickly got up to speed and delivered our work on time, despite some challenges.
What are the sequences made by Digital Domain?
Piotr Karwas: Our primary focus was the final battle sequence, but we also contributed to several fully live-action shots featuring set extensions and some CG animation, primarily around the entrance to the mine.
Could you walk us through the process of creating the 500+ Piglins and Iron Golems clashing in that 360° battlefield? What were some of the major technical challenges in making that sequence come to life?
Piotr Karwas: One of the key creative challenges was striking the right balance between honoring the iconic look and feel of the game while delivering a cinematic, action-packed experience.
The goal was to blend a sense of realism through the movement and design of characters and environments with the charm and style of the Minecraft universe. Under the guidance of Jared and Dan, and in close collaboration with the other vendors, we were able to craft something truly unique.
The battle unfolds during the Piglin invasion, as the sunny atmosphere of the Overworld begins to transform into a darker, more menacing environment reminiscent of the Nether. The entire battlefield was designed to function seamlessly in both visual states, capturing the warmth and cheer of the original Overworld, while also supporting its dramatic shift into a hellish landscape filled with fire and gloom.
Additionally, the stylized world of Minecraft presented some technical hurdles, especially in large scale crowd sequences. The characters’ unconventional anatomy, limited range of motion, and signature fighting styles added an extra layer of complexity but also pushed us to be creative and innovative.
Liz Bernard: We started out with 10 piglins, each of which had 2-6 costumes, plus 8 weapons and 2 torches. We were able to get a lot of variety out of that for our piglin horde. The golem army was smaller and more uniform, and golems are too powerful to be messing around with weapons. Instead, they prefer to use their iron arms to smash through their opponents, so we didn’t have as many different iterations, costumes, and such for the iron golems. In Animation, we moved as fast as possible to clean up and modify a big pile of motion capture so that we could provide our Crowds team with over 300 unique animation cycles and clips. Those clips included everything from golems doing windmill arm attacks, to piglins hacking at golem legs with axes and swords, to baby piglins running around in circles, freaking out. Although we started with motion capture for most of the piglin actions, transferring those actions from a full sized human mocap actor onto 10 different blocky piglins with giant angular heads and different body proportions meant each mocap clip needed a lot of adjustment. For example, piglins cannot raise their square little arms very high because their shoulders will quickly crash into the head. Once we had ploughed through that chunk of work, our Crowds team strung those actions together in Autodesk’s Golaem software to create the crowds seen in the backgrounds of our shots. In the mid-ground, we animated a custom set of longer battle vignettes that we could reuse in a number of shots by reorienting them to camera and offsetting their timing. And of course, there was quite a lot of hero animation to fill in the foreground and tell the story of the ebb and flow of battle.
Minecraft is known for its blocky aesthetic. How was the animation rigging approached to stay true to that while enhancing the characters’ performance for live action?
Liz Bernard: The piglins, hoglins, and wolves were rigged as pretty standard fleshy characters. The wolves had blocky chests and hips, which our Rigging team kept relatively stiff to preserve the original block shape even when we posed the characters in action. Because we were in a hurry on this fast-paced show, we needed to get rigs into Animation’s hands as quickly as possible, so we ended up relying on our shot modeling/sculpting team to adjust some of the characters’ bodies after animation was approved. They paid special attention to the final look of their shoulders, elbows, and knees, to make sure that the bend at each joint stayed as blocky as possible.
The iron golems were a lot trickier to get right because they were made of stiff blocks of metal, had no deforming parts, and their joints were extremely simple. We discovered right away that making an iron golem walk meant instant intersections where the legs attach to the hips and the arms attach to the shoulders. So, to solve that problem and get the golems engaged in the battle, we had to give the animators complete control over every body part. This is not something we typically do because it’s easy to go overboard and end up “off model,” but in this scenario, it was absolutely required. This level of control gave the animators the option to offset body parts to achieve the necessary range of movement without visible intersections on screen or gaps in silhouette.
Houdini was used to procedurally generate environments for the film. What were some of the most challenging aspects of creating such vast, dynamic landscapes?
Piotr Karwas: The environments posed a unique challenge, not just because of their blocky nature, but because it was essential to make the Overworld feel like a tangible, real place. Some design choices were influenced by physical sets that had been built, while others drew inspiration from the real world. We focused on introducing a sense of natural imperfection, subtle elements like slightly uneven lines, worn edges, scuff marks, scattered debris, dirt, and even touches of realistic vegetation. All of this had to be carefully integrated into the strict, grid-based aesthetic of the Minecraft universe. Our environment team rose to the challenge and delivered a highly detailed immersive location, while working under a demanding production schedule.
What were the biggest challenges in adapting Minecraft’s creatures and characters into a live-action setting while retaining their iconic charm?
Liz Bernard: Because we came onto the project towards the end of shot production, we were able to use other vendors’ work as a rough guide for how our characters should move and behave. The Iron Golems in particular were a fun challenge, and although Sony had a few shots that we could refer to for the overall movement, it was up to us to establish their combat style. We researched how the golems fight in the game, which, as it turns out, is quite simple. We stuck with the game’s stiff legged walk, simple straight arm swings and skyward scoops to match the game’s iron golem attack style as closely as we could. However, purely matching the game wasn’t going to look quite right in a live action environment with human actors. So, on top of the simple performance, we layered weight shifts to counterbalance the heavy arms. We also added some additional step patterns to get them into position to attack piglins so that they would appear clever and more agile without straying too far from the game aesthetic. We also improved the contacts between the golems’ arms and each piglin to really sell the sense of effort and weight in each attack and hit.
The destruction of the Overworld Portal seems like a monumental task. How was such an epic scene created, and what role did the environment and FX teams play in bringing it to life?
Piotr Karwas: One of the biggest challenges was figuring out the mechanics of how large-scale destruction would play out in the Minecraft world. We had to carefully determine which elements would follow real-world physics and which could behave in a more stylized, game inspired way. We also spent considerable time designing the post-collapse remains to ensure they were visually compelling and cohesive for the staging of the shots that followed.
The portal destruction sequence, in particular, appeared in the two widest shots of the entire sequence. These moments required both armies to be on screen, complete with fallen Iron Golems, defeated or pork-chopped Piglins, and digital doubles for every actor. It was a massive technical, logistical, and creative undertaking. We worked on these shots all the way to the final hour.
Can you describe the bespoke zombification transformation pipeline developed for the Piglins? How did this process differ from traditional character transformations?
Piotr Karwas: By the time we joined the project, the zombification effect had already been largely developed by Weta FX. One of our main challenges was matching their established look while ensuring visual consistency across both their shots and ours. At the same time, we knew we had to push the effect further. After all, this was the grand finale, where the evil army was being defeated. We also wanted the transformation to feel distinct, especially when applied to large numbers of Piglins. To achieve that, we went as far as building complete skeletal systems that could be revealed during the transformation.
How was lighting handled to simulate firelit nighttime chaos? What tools or techniques were critical in creating that atmosphere?
Piotr Karwas: To achieve the most realistic look, we used actual fire simulations to drive the lighting on both the characters and the environment. We initially started with just a few fires, but Jared was drawn to the striking visual accents and the warm hues they cast on the characters. As a result, we ended up populating the scenes with hundreds of fires. The air was also filled with atmospheric elements like smoke, ash, and embers, all contributing to a richly textured, apocalyptic feel in every shot. To manage this across numerous shots, we developed semi-automated methods to batch simulate the effects efficiently.
How was humor incorporated into the animation, especially with subtle gags like pork chops dropping onto the battlefield or background antics? What approach was used to time these moments?
Liz Bernard: We had a good time adding easter eggs and gags into this epic battle scene! Piotr let me know early on that Jared would welcome goofy touches, especially on background characters, so I made sure to pass that information on to my team of animators. What did I get back? Nose picks, butt scratches, belly slaps, and all sorts of goofy behaviour in the background. We usually didn’t center those things in the action unless it was called for in the script, but if you look carefully, you’ll find maximum silliness all over the place.
And, of course, I have to mention the Great Hog here. He was probably our funniest character and the most challenging to animate. His style of movement was dictated by his unusual proportions, in particular, his itty-bitty legs and long chunky arms. Those stumpy legs meant his stride was super short unless he broke out into a full quadruped gallop, which our team animated with extra oomph and effort to get a good laugh. The Great Hog’s low rider pants took a dive after one particularly strenuous sprint across the battlefield to attack Natalie. When he rose up on hind legs in anticipation of smashing her with his giant blocky fists, Jared wanted to make sure that the audience could see clearly the gag that his butt crack was showing. In VFX, we traditionally call a gradient of options that we would pitch to the client a “wedge.” In this case, we needed to get a read on how low to go with the pants before we simulated them in CFX, so we sent over a “wedge” for the pants and butt crack for Jared to pick from. In this case, I guess it was actually…a wedgie.
How was the visual humor seamlessly integrated into the more intense action sequences, and was there a particular moment that captured this balance perfectly?
Liz Bernard: The visual humour was baked into the action from the get-go, from game to storyboards to previsualization. I mean, there’s something inherently funny about dozens of piglins in shorts getting smacked high up into the air and then poof! turning into porkchops. When I welcomed each animator to the show, I made a point of mentioning that they were a little more free to tell jokes with pantomime on this show than they might be used to on more realistic productions. Because we were always in a mindset to make each shot as funny as possible without distracting from the story points, the flavour in animation dailies was always funny. My team pitched piglins getting run over by the Great Hog by accident, baby piglins riding on an iron golem attempting to attack its head, some utterly hilarious slow-mo action with exaggerated overlap a la Baywatch, a hoglin and piglin rider mugging for the camera as they gallop by in the foreground, wolves clamped on by their teeth to the waistband of the Great Hog, and a whole lot of over-acted melodramatic writhing as the piglins zombified after the portal collapsed. You don’t have to tell animators twice to be silly.
With such a large-scale project, how did the animation and VFX teams collaborate to maintain a cohesive style across both departments? Were there any specific moments where this collaboration stood out?
Liz Bernard: This was a ripsnorter of a project timeline, so all departments were hitting the ground running and developing their parts of the project concurrently. That’s always challenging and requires a lot of communication to pull off. We had a bullpen of experienced folks in our show leadership, and knowing what each other’s departments could and couldn’t do saved us a lot of time as we ramped up. For example, we were able to establish a single groundplane early in our animation schedule, which helped us avoid having to adjust the character’s feet contacts to an evolving environment even as artists were still building the overworld battlefield. The Environments team did a great job set dressing the environment after we had placed our animation and crowds’ characters, so that we did not need to worry about running through plants, pebbles, fires, or corpses. The FX department established a workflow with the Crowds team to “porkchop” any crowds piglin that got smacked by crowds’ iron golems. Setting these rules and criteria helped each department streamline their processes. And, our production team did an absolutely incredible job making sure that every department stayed on target, communicated their roadblocks and breakthroughs effectively downstream, and adjusted the schedule to compensate. I think the moment where this collaboration really shone was when we saw all of the zombification shots at the end of the sequence starting to fall into place. One day, it felt like we had all of them left to tackle, and the next, we had our methodology kinks worked out and they all started to drop like dominoes.
Piotr Karwas: As Liz mentioned, the schedule was extremely tight, especially for executing the film’s grand finale. We had to move quickly and strategically, knowing that things would evolve and change throughout production. I’m incredibly grateful to our amazing team at Digital Domain. Across all four locations, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Montreal, and Hyderabad, our artists worked around the clock to bring it all to life. Yes, there were long hours, high stress, and the usual frustrations with technology that doesn’t always behave but in the end, it was all absolutely worth it. Seeing kids enjoy the movie so much made everything worthwhile. Chicken Jockey!
Looking back on the project, what aspects of the visual effects are you most proud of?
Piotr Karwas: Without a doubt, the Great Hog’s butt crack was the highlight for me.
Liz Bernard: Just the sheer scale of this thing is wild. This is one of those “more is more” kinds of projects that don’t come around so often in our world of photorealistic visual effects. Nothing was supposed to be “real” here, everything was exaggerated, every frame we produced was chock full of crazy action, over the top humor, and easter eggs. I’m very proud of our animation team for embracing this hilarious show in a more cartoony style that we don’t often have the opportunity to tackle. And, man, it tickles me that the fans got such a huge kick out of it all when the movie hit theatres. What else can you ask for?
How long have you worked on this show?
Piotr Karwas: About six months
Liz Bernard: Just six months from start to finish.
What’s the VFX shots count?
Piotr Karwas: Digital Domain delivered 187 shots not including omits.
What is your next project?
Piotr Karwas: A Minecraft Movie I hope. Jokes aside, I’m looking at a whole slate of different projects.
Liz Bernard: All I can say right now is that it’s a science fiction film that comes out in 2026. Stay tuned!
A big thanks for your time.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?Digital Domain: Dedicated page about A Minecraft Movie on Digital Domain website.
© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025
#minecraft #movie #piotr #karwas #vfxA Minecraft Movie: Piotr Karwas (VFX Supervisor) & Elizabeth “Liz” Bernard (Animation Supervisor) – Digital Domain
Interviews
A Minecraft Movie: Piotr Karwas& Elizabeth “Liz” Bernard– Digital Domain
By Vincent Frei - 20/05/2025
With 20+ years in film and advertising, Piotr Karwas has supervised VFX for top directors including David Fincher and Tim Burton. His recent work includes The Electric State, Elevation, he’s here today to talk about the Digital Domain work on A Minecraft Movie.
After discussing The Electric State with us a few months ago, Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Bernard is back—this time to talk about her work on A Minecraft Movie.
How did you and Digital Domain get involved on this show?
Piotr Karwas: We were approached by the Warner Bros. VFX team as they were looking to bring on an additional vendor to help complete the remaining visual effects work. It was also an opportunity to be the best dad ever, since both of my kids are huge Minecraft fans.
How was the collaboration with Director Jared Hess and VFX Supervisor Dan Lemmon?
Piotr Karwas: I’ve known Dan Lemmon since our time working together at Digital Domain. We collaborated on several projects in the early 2000s, so it was a great opportunity to team up again. As for Jared, I’ve been a fan of his work ever since his first feature, Napoleon Dynamite. Years ago, I also had the chance to briefly work on his film Gentlemen Broncos.
The blend of Jared’s signature humor with the global phenomenon of Minecraft was simply too exciting to pass up. I knew I wanted to be involved. Although Digital Domain joined the project later in the production process, we quickly got up to speed and delivered our work on time, despite some challenges.
What are the sequences made by Digital Domain?
Piotr Karwas: Our primary focus was the final battle sequence, but we also contributed to several fully live-action shots featuring set extensions and some CG animation, primarily around the entrance to the mine.
Could you walk us through the process of creating the 500+ Piglins and Iron Golems clashing in that 360° battlefield? What were some of the major technical challenges in making that sequence come to life?
Piotr Karwas: One of the key creative challenges was striking the right balance between honoring the iconic look and feel of the game while delivering a cinematic, action-packed experience.
The goal was to blend a sense of realism through the movement and design of characters and environments with the charm and style of the Minecraft universe. Under the guidance of Jared and Dan, and in close collaboration with the other vendors, we were able to craft something truly unique.
The battle unfolds during the Piglin invasion, as the sunny atmosphere of the Overworld begins to transform into a darker, more menacing environment reminiscent of the Nether. The entire battlefield was designed to function seamlessly in both visual states, capturing the warmth and cheer of the original Overworld, while also supporting its dramatic shift into a hellish landscape filled with fire and gloom.
Additionally, the stylized world of Minecraft presented some technical hurdles, especially in large scale crowd sequences. The characters’ unconventional anatomy, limited range of motion, and signature fighting styles added an extra layer of complexity but also pushed us to be creative and innovative.
Liz Bernard: We started out with 10 piglins, each of which had 2-6 costumes, plus 8 weapons and 2 torches. We were able to get a lot of variety out of that for our piglin horde. The golem army was smaller and more uniform, and golems are too powerful to be messing around with weapons. Instead, they prefer to use their iron arms to smash through their opponents, so we didn’t have as many different iterations, costumes, and such for the iron golems. In Animation, we moved as fast as possible to clean up and modify a big pile of motion capture so that we could provide our Crowds team with over 300 unique animation cycles and clips. Those clips included everything from golems doing windmill arm attacks, to piglins hacking at golem legs with axes and swords, to baby piglins running around in circles, freaking out. Although we started with motion capture for most of the piglin actions, transferring those actions from a full sized human mocap actor onto 10 different blocky piglins with giant angular heads and different body proportions meant each mocap clip needed a lot of adjustment. For example, piglins cannot raise their square little arms very high because their shoulders will quickly crash into the head. Once we had ploughed through that chunk of work, our Crowds team strung those actions together in Autodesk’s Golaem software to create the crowds seen in the backgrounds of our shots. In the mid-ground, we animated a custom set of longer battle vignettes that we could reuse in a number of shots by reorienting them to camera and offsetting their timing. And of course, there was quite a lot of hero animation to fill in the foreground and tell the story of the ebb and flow of battle.
Minecraft is known for its blocky aesthetic. How was the animation rigging approached to stay true to that while enhancing the characters’ performance for live action?
Liz Bernard: The piglins, hoglins, and wolves were rigged as pretty standard fleshy characters. The wolves had blocky chests and hips, which our Rigging team kept relatively stiff to preserve the original block shape even when we posed the characters in action. Because we were in a hurry on this fast-paced show, we needed to get rigs into Animation’s hands as quickly as possible, so we ended up relying on our shot modeling/sculpting team to adjust some of the characters’ bodies after animation was approved. They paid special attention to the final look of their shoulders, elbows, and knees, to make sure that the bend at each joint stayed as blocky as possible.
The iron golems were a lot trickier to get right because they were made of stiff blocks of metal, had no deforming parts, and their joints were extremely simple. We discovered right away that making an iron golem walk meant instant intersections where the legs attach to the hips and the arms attach to the shoulders. So, to solve that problem and get the golems engaged in the battle, we had to give the animators complete control over every body part. This is not something we typically do because it’s easy to go overboard and end up “off model,” but in this scenario, it was absolutely required. This level of control gave the animators the option to offset body parts to achieve the necessary range of movement without visible intersections on screen or gaps in silhouette.
Houdini was used to procedurally generate environments for the film. What were some of the most challenging aspects of creating such vast, dynamic landscapes?
Piotr Karwas: The environments posed a unique challenge, not just because of their blocky nature, but because it was essential to make the Overworld feel like a tangible, real place. Some design choices were influenced by physical sets that had been built, while others drew inspiration from the real world. We focused on introducing a sense of natural imperfection, subtle elements like slightly uneven lines, worn edges, scuff marks, scattered debris, dirt, and even touches of realistic vegetation. All of this had to be carefully integrated into the strict, grid-based aesthetic of the Minecraft universe. Our environment team rose to the challenge and delivered a highly detailed immersive location, while working under a demanding production schedule.
What were the biggest challenges in adapting Minecraft’s creatures and characters into a live-action setting while retaining their iconic charm?
Liz Bernard: Because we came onto the project towards the end of shot production, we were able to use other vendors’ work as a rough guide for how our characters should move and behave. The Iron Golems in particular were a fun challenge, and although Sony had a few shots that we could refer to for the overall movement, it was up to us to establish their combat style. We researched how the golems fight in the game, which, as it turns out, is quite simple. We stuck with the game’s stiff legged walk, simple straight arm swings and skyward scoops to match the game’s iron golem attack style as closely as we could. However, purely matching the game wasn’t going to look quite right in a live action environment with human actors. So, on top of the simple performance, we layered weight shifts to counterbalance the heavy arms. We also added some additional step patterns to get them into position to attack piglins so that they would appear clever and more agile without straying too far from the game aesthetic. We also improved the contacts between the golems’ arms and each piglin to really sell the sense of effort and weight in each attack and hit.
The destruction of the Overworld Portal seems like a monumental task. How was such an epic scene created, and what role did the environment and FX teams play in bringing it to life?
Piotr Karwas: One of the biggest challenges was figuring out the mechanics of how large-scale destruction would play out in the Minecraft world. We had to carefully determine which elements would follow real-world physics and which could behave in a more stylized, game inspired way. We also spent considerable time designing the post-collapse remains to ensure they were visually compelling and cohesive for the staging of the shots that followed.
The portal destruction sequence, in particular, appeared in the two widest shots of the entire sequence. These moments required both armies to be on screen, complete with fallen Iron Golems, defeated or pork-chopped Piglins, and digital doubles for every actor. It was a massive technical, logistical, and creative undertaking. We worked on these shots all the way to the final hour.
Can you describe the bespoke zombification transformation pipeline developed for the Piglins? How did this process differ from traditional character transformations?
Piotr Karwas: By the time we joined the project, the zombification effect had already been largely developed by Weta FX. One of our main challenges was matching their established look while ensuring visual consistency across both their shots and ours. At the same time, we knew we had to push the effect further. After all, this was the grand finale, where the evil army was being defeated. We also wanted the transformation to feel distinct, especially when applied to large numbers of Piglins. To achieve that, we went as far as building complete skeletal systems that could be revealed during the transformation.
How was lighting handled to simulate firelit nighttime chaos? What tools or techniques were critical in creating that atmosphere?
Piotr Karwas: To achieve the most realistic look, we used actual fire simulations to drive the lighting on both the characters and the environment. We initially started with just a few fires, but Jared was drawn to the striking visual accents and the warm hues they cast on the characters. As a result, we ended up populating the scenes with hundreds of fires. The air was also filled with atmospheric elements like smoke, ash, and embers, all contributing to a richly textured, apocalyptic feel in every shot. To manage this across numerous shots, we developed semi-automated methods to batch simulate the effects efficiently.
How was humor incorporated into the animation, especially with subtle gags like pork chops dropping onto the battlefield or background antics? What approach was used to time these moments?
Liz Bernard: We had a good time adding easter eggs and gags into this epic battle scene! Piotr let me know early on that Jared would welcome goofy touches, especially on background characters, so I made sure to pass that information on to my team of animators. What did I get back? Nose picks, butt scratches, belly slaps, and all sorts of goofy behaviour in the background. We usually didn’t center those things in the action unless it was called for in the script, but if you look carefully, you’ll find maximum silliness all over the place.
And, of course, I have to mention the Great Hog here. He was probably our funniest character and the most challenging to animate. His style of movement was dictated by his unusual proportions, in particular, his itty-bitty legs and long chunky arms. Those stumpy legs meant his stride was super short unless he broke out into a full quadruped gallop, which our team animated with extra oomph and effort to get a good laugh. The Great Hog’s low rider pants took a dive after one particularly strenuous sprint across the battlefield to attack Natalie. When he rose up on hind legs in anticipation of smashing her with his giant blocky fists, Jared wanted to make sure that the audience could see clearly the gag that his butt crack was showing. In VFX, we traditionally call a gradient of options that we would pitch to the client a “wedge.” In this case, we needed to get a read on how low to go with the pants before we simulated them in CFX, so we sent over a “wedge” for the pants and butt crack for Jared to pick from. In this case, I guess it was actually…a wedgie.
How was the visual humor seamlessly integrated into the more intense action sequences, and was there a particular moment that captured this balance perfectly?
Liz Bernard: The visual humour was baked into the action from the get-go, from game to storyboards to previsualization. I mean, there’s something inherently funny about dozens of piglins in shorts getting smacked high up into the air and then poof! turning into porkchops. When I welcomed each animator to the show, I made a point of mentioning that they were a little more free to tell jokes with pantomime on this show than they might be used to on more realistic productions. Because we were always in a mindset to make each shot as funny as possible without distracting from the story points, the flavour in animation dailies was always funny. My team pitched piglins getting run over by the Great Hog by accident, baby piglins riding on an iron golem attempting to attack its head, some utterly hilarious slow-mo action with exaggerated overlap a la Baywatch, a hoglin and piglin rider mugging for the camera as they gallop by in the foreground, wolves clamped on by their teeth to the waistband of the Great Hog, and a whole lot of over-acted melodramatic writhing as the piglins zombified after the portal collapsed. You don’t have to tell animators twice to be silly.
With such a large-scale project, how did the animation and VFX teams collaborate to maintain a cohesive style across both departments? Were there any specific moments where this collaboration stood out?
Liz Bernard: This was a ripsnorter of a project timeline, so all departments were hitting the ground running and developing their parts of the project concurrently. That’s always challenging and requires a lot of communication to pull off. We had a bullpen of experienced folks in our show leadership, and knowing what each other’s departments could and couldn’t do saved us a lot of time as we ramped up. For example, we were able to establish a single groundplane early in our animation schedule, which helped us avoid having to adjust the character’s feet contacts to an evolving environment even as artists were still building the overworld battlefield. The Environments team did a great job set dressing the environment after we had placed our animation and crowds’ characters, so that we did not need to worry about running through plants, pebbles, fires, or corpses. The FX department established a workflow with the Crowds team to “porkchop” any crowds piglin that got smacked by crowds’ iron golems. Setting these rules and criteria helped each department streamline their processes. And, our production team did an absolutely incredible job making sure that every department stayed on target, communicated their roadblocks and breakthroughs effectively downstream, and adjusted the schedule to compensate. I think the moment where this collaboration really shone was when we saw all of the zombification shots at the end of the sequence starting to fall into place. One day, it felt like we had all of them left to tackle, and the next, we had our methodology kinks worked out and they all started to drop like dominoes.
Piotr Karwas: As Liz mentioned, the schedule was extremely tight, especially for executing the film’s grand finale. We had to move quickly and strategically, knowing that things would evolve and change throughout production. I’m incredibly grateful to our amazing team at Digital Domain. Across all four locations, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Montreal, and Hyderabad, our artists worked around the clock to bring it all to life. Yes, there were long hours, high stress, and the usual frustrations with technology that doesn’t always behave but in the end, it was all absolutely worth it. Seeing kids enjoy the movie so much made everything worthwhile. Chicken Jockey!
Looking back on the project, what aspects of the visual effects are you most proud of?
Piotr Karwas: Without a doubt, the Great Hog’s butt crack was the highlight for me.
Liz Bernard: Just the sheer scale of this thing is wild. This is one of those “more is more” kinds of projects that don’t come around so often in our world of photorealistic visual effects. Nothing was supposed to be “real” here, everything was exaggerated, every frame we produced was chock full of crazy action, over the top humor, and easter eggs. I’m very proud of our animation team for embracing this hilarious show in a more cartoony style that we don’t often have the opportunity to tackle. And, man, it tickles me that the fans got such a huge kick out of it all when the movie hit theatres. What else can you ask for?
How long have you worked on this show?
Piotr Karwas: About six months
Liz Bernard: Just six months from start to finish.
What’s the VFX shots count?
Piotr Karwas: Digital Domain delivered 187 shots not including omits.
What is your next project?
Piotr Karwas: A Minecraft Movie I hope. Jokes aside, I’m looking at a whole slate of different projects.
Liz Bernard: All I can say right now is that it’s a science fiction film that comes out in 2026. Stay tuned!
A big thanks for your time.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?Digital Domain: Dedicated page about A Minecraft Movie on Digital Domain website.
© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025
#minecraft #movie #piotr #karwas #vfx
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