‘A Minecraft Movie’: Wētā FX Helps Adapt an Iconic Game One Block at a Time
Adapting the iconic, block-based design aesthetic of Mojang’s beloved Minecraft videogame into the hit feature film comedy adventure, The Minecraft Movie, posed an enormous number of hurdles for director Jared Hess and Oscar-winning Production VFX Supervisor Dan Lemmon. Tasked with helping translate the iconic pixelated world into something cinematically engaging, while remaining true to its visual DNA, was Wētā FX, who delivered 450 VFX shots on the film. And two of their key leads on the film were VFX Supervisor Sheldon Stopsack and Animation Supervisor Kevin Estey.
But the shot count merely scratches the surface of the extensive work the studio performed. Wētā led the design and creation of The Overworld, 64 unique terrains spanning deserts, lush forests, oceans, and mountain ranges, all combined into one continuous environment, assets that were also shared with Digital Domain for their work on the 3rd act battle. Wētā also handled extensive work on the lava-filled hellscape of The Nether that involved Unreal Engine for early representations used in previs, scene scouting, and onset during principal photography, before refining the environment during post-production. They also dressed The Nether with lava, fire, and torches, along with atmospherics and particulate like smoke, ash, and embers.
But wait… there’s more!
The studio’s Art Department, working closely with Hess, co-created the look and feel of all digital characters in the film. For Malgosha’s henchmen, the Piglins, Wētā designed and created 12 different variants, all with individual characteristics and personalities. They also designed sheep, bees, pandas, zombies, skeletons, and lovable wolf Dennis. Many of these characters were provided to other vendors for their work on the film.
Needless to say, the studio truly became a “Master Builder” on the show.
The film is based on the hugely popular game Minecraft, first released by Sweden’s Mojang Studios in 2011 and purchased by Microsoft for 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:
In a far-ranging interview, Stopsack and Estey shared with AWN a peek into their creative process, from early design exploration to creation of an intricate practical cloak for Malgosha and the use of Unreal Engine for previs, postvis, and real-time onset visualization.
Dan Sarto: The film is filled with distinct settings and characters sporting various “block” styled features. Can you share some of the work you did on the environments, character design, and character animation?
Sheldon Stopsack: There's, there's so much to talk about and truth to be told, if you were to touch on everything, we would probably need to spend the whole day together.
Kevin Estey: Sheldon and I realized that when we talk about the film, either amongst ourselves or with someone else, we could just keep going, there are so many stories to tell.
DS: Well, start with The Overworld and The Nether. How did the design process begin? What did you have to work with?
SS: Visual effects is a tricky business, you know. It's always difficult. Always challenging. However, Minecraft stood out to us as not your usual quote unquote standard visual effects project, even though as you know, there is no standard visual effects project because they're all somehow different. They all come with their own creative ideas, inspirations, and challenges. But Minecraft, right from the get-go, was different, simply by the fact that when you first consider the idea of making such a live-action movie, you instantly ask yourself, “How do we make this work? How do we combine these two inherently very, very different but unique worlds?” That was everyone’s number one question. How do we land this? Where do we land this? And I don't think that any of us really had an answer, including our clients, Dan Lemmonand Jared Hess. Everyone was really open for this journey. That's compelling for us, to get out of our comfort zone. It makes you nervous because there are no real obvious answers.
KE: Early on, we seemed to thrive off these kinds of scary creative challenges. There were lots of question marks. We had many moments when we were trying to figure out character designs. We had a template from the game, but it was an incredibly vague, low-resolution template. And there were so many ways that we could go. But that design discovery throughout the project was really satisfying.
DS: Game adaptations are never simple. There usually isn’t much in the way of story. But with Minecraft, from a visual standpoint, how did you translate low res, block-styled characters into something entertaining that could sustain a 100-minute feature film?
SS: Everything was a question mark. Using the lava that you see in The Nether as one example, we had beautiful concept art for all our environments, The Overworld and The Nether, but those concepts only really took you this far. They didn’t represent the block shapes or give you a clear answer of like how realistic some of those materials, shapes and structures would be. How organic would we go? All of this needed to be explored. For the lava, we had stylized concept pieces, with block shaped viscosity as it flowed down. But we spent months with our effects team, and Dan and Jared, just riffing on ideas. We came full circle, with the lava ending up being more realistic, a naturally viscous liquid based on real physics. And the same goes with the waterfall that you see in the Overworld.
The question is, how far do we take things into the true Minecraft representation of things? How much do we scale back a little bit and ground ourselves in reality, with effects we’re quite comfortable producing as a company? There's always a tradeoff to find that balance of how best to combine what’s been filmed, the practical sets and live-action performances, with effects. Where’s the sweet spot? What's the level of abstraction? What's honest to the game? As much as some call Minecraft a simple game, it isn't simple, right? It's incredibly complex. It's got a set of rules and logic to the world building process within the game that we had to learn, adapt, and honor in many ways.
When our misfits first arrive and we have these big vistas and establishing shots, when you really look at it, you, you recognize a lot of the things that we tried to adapt from the game. There are different biomes, like the Badlands, which is very sand stoney; there's the Woodlands, which is a lush environment with cherry blossom trees; you’ve got the snow biome with big mountains in the background. Our intent was to honor the game.
KE: I took a big cue from a lot of the early designs, and particularly the approach that Jared liked for the characters and to the design in general, which was maintaining the stylized, blocky aesthetic, but covering them in realistic flesh, fur, things that were going to make them appear as real as possible despite the absolutely unreal designs of their bodies. And so essentially, it was squared skeleton… squarish bones with flesh and realistic fur laid over top. We tried various things, all extremely stylized. The Creepers are a good example. We tried all kinds of ways for them to explode. Sheldon found a great reference for a cat coughing up a hairball. He was nice to censor the worst part of it, but those undulations in the chest and ribcage… Jared spoke of the Creepers being basically tragic characters that only wanted to be loved, to just be close to you. But sadly, whenever they did, they’d explode. So, we experimented with a lot of different motions of how they’d explode.
DS: Talk about the process of determining how these characters would move. None seem to have remotely realistic proportions in their limbs, bodies, or head size.
KE: There were a couple things that Jared always seemed to be chasing. One was just something that would make him laugh. Of course, it had to sit within the bounds of how a zombie might move, or a skeleton might move, as we were interpreting the game. But the main thing was just, was it fun and funny? I still remember one of the earliest gags they came up with in mocap sessions, even before I even joined the show, was how the zombies get up after they fall over. It was sort of like a tripod, where its face and feet were planted and its butt shoots up in the air.
After a lot of experimentation, we came up with basic personality types for each character. There were 12 different types of Piglins. The zombies were essentially like you're coming home from the pub after a few too many pints and you're just trying to get in the door, but you can't find your keys. Loose, slightly inebriated movement. The best movement we found for the skeletons was essentially like an old man with rigid limbs and lack of ligaments that was chasing kids off his lawn. And so, we created this kind of bible of performance types that really helped guide performers on the mocap stage and animators later on.
SS: A lot of our exploration didn’t stick. But Jared was the expert in all of this. He always came up with some quirky last-minute idea.
KE: My favorite from Jared came in the middle of one mocap shoot. He walked up to me and said he had this stupid idea. I said OK, go on. He said, what if Malgosha had these two little pigs next to her, like Catholic alter boys, swinging incense. Can we do that? I talked to our stage manager, and we quickly put together a temporary prop for the incense burners. And we got two performers who just stood there. What are they going to do? Jared said, “Nothing. Just stand there and swing. I think it would look funny.” So, that’s what we did. We dubbed them the Priesty Boys. And they are there throughout the film. That was amazing about Jared. He was always like, let's just try it, see if it works. Otherwise ditch it.
DS: Tell me about your work on Malgosha. And I also want to discuss your use of Unreal Engine and the previs and postvis work.
SS: For Malgosha as a character, our art department did a phenomenal job finding the character design at the concept phase. But it was a collective effort. So many contributors were involved in her making. And I'm not just talking about the digital artists here on our side. It was a joint venture of different people having different explorations and experiments. It started off with the concept work as a foundation, which we mocked up with 3D sketches before building a model. But with Malgosha, we also had the costume department on the production side building this elaborate cloak. Remember, that cloak kind of makes 80, 85% of her appearance. It's almost like a character in itself, the way we utilized it. And the costume department built this beautiful, elaborate, incredibly intricate, practical version of it that we intended to use on set for the performer to wear. It ended up being too impractical because it was too heavy. But it was beautiful. So, while we didn't really use it on set, it gave us something physically to kind of incorporate into our digital version.
KE: Alan Henry is the motion performer who portrayed her on set and on the mocap stage. I've known him for close to 15 years. I started working with him on The Hobbit films. He was a stunt performer who eventually rolled into doing motion capture with us on The Hobbit. He’s an incredible actor and absolutely hilarious and can adapt to any sort of situation. He’s so improvisational. He came up with an approach to Malgosha very quickly. Added a limp so that she felt decrepit, leaning on the staff, adding her other arm as kind of like a gimp arm that she would point and gesture with.
Even though she’s a blocky character, her anatomy is very much a biped, with rounder limbs than the other Piglins. She's got hooves, is somewhat squarish, and her much more bulky mass in the middle was easier to manipulate and move around. Because she would have to battle with Steve in the end, she had to have a level of agility that even some of the Piglins didn't have.
DS: Did Unreal Engine come into play with her?
SS: Unreal was used all the way through the project. Dan Lemmon and his team early on set up their own virtual art department to build representations of the Overworld and the Nether within the context of Unreal. We and Sony Imageworks tried to provide recreations of these environments that were then used within Unreal to previsualize what was happening on set during shooting of principal photography. And that's where our mocap and on-set teams were coming into play. Effects provided what we called the Nudge Cam. It was a system to do real-time tracking using a stereo pair of Basler computer vision cameras that were mounted onto the sides of the principal camera. We provided the live tracking that was then composited in real time with the Unreal Engine content that all the vendors had provided. It was a great way of utilizing Unreal to give the camera operators or DOP, even Jared, a good sense of what we would actually shoot. It gave everyone a little bit of context for the look and feel of what you could actually expect from these scenes.
Because we started this journey with Unreal having onset in mind, we internally decided, look, let's take this further. Let's take this into post-production as well. What would it take to utilize Unreal for shot creation? And it was really exclusively used on the Nether environment. I don’t want to say we used it for matte painting replacement. We used it more for say, let's build this extended environment in Unreal. Not only use it as a render engine with this reasonably fast turnaround but also use it for what it's good at: authoring things, quickly changing things, moving columns around, manipulating things, dressing them, lighting them, and rendering them. It became sort of a tool that we used in place of a traditional matte painting for the extended environments.
KE: Another thing worth mentioning is we were able to utilize it on our mocap stage as well during the two-week shoot with Jared and crew. When we shoot on the mocap stage, we get a very simple sort of gray shaded diagnostic grid. You have your single-color characters that sometimes are textured, but they’re fairly simple without any context of environment. Our special projects team was able to port what we usually see in Giant, the software we use on the mocap stage, into Unreal, which gave us these beautifully lit environments with interactive fire and atmosphere. And Jared and the team could see their movie for the first time in a rough, but still very beautiful rough state. That was invaluable.
DS: If you had to key on anything, what would say with the biggest challenges for your teams on the film? You're laughing. I can hear you thinking, “Do we have an hour?”
KE: Where do you begin?
SS: Exactly. It's so hard to really single one out. And I struggle with that question every time I've been asked that question.
KE: I’ll start. I've got a very simple practical answer and then a larger one, something that was new to us, kind of similar to what we were just talking about. The simple practical one is the Piglins square feet with no ankles. It was very tough to make them walk realistically. Think of the leg of a chair. How do you make that roll and bank and bend because there is no joint? There are a lot of Piglins walking on surfaces and it was a very difficult conundrum to solve. It took a lot of hard work from our motion edit team and our animation team to get those things walking realistically. You know, it’s doing that simple thing that you don't usually pay attention to. So that was one reasonably big challenge that is often literally buried in the shadows. The bigger one was something that was new to me. We often do a lot of our previs and postvis in-house and then finish the shots. And just because of circumstances and capacity, we did the postvis for the entire final battle, but we ended up sharing the sequence with Digital Domain, who did an amazing job completing some of the stuff on the Battlefield we did post on. For me personally, I've never experienced not finishing what I started. But it was also really rewarding to see how well the work we had put in was honored by DD when they took it over.
SS: I think the biggest challenge and the biggest achievement that I'm most proud of is really ending up with something that was well received by the wider audience. Of creating these two worlds, this sort of abstract adaptation of the Minecraft game and combining it with live-action. That was the achievement for me. That was the biggest challenge. We were all nervous from day one. And we continued to be nervous up until the day the movie came out. None of us really knew how it ultimately would be received. The fact that it came together and was so well received is a testament to everyone doing a fantastic job. And that's what I'm incredibly proud of.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
#minecraft #movie #wētā #helps #adapt‘A Minecraft Movie’: Wētā FX Helps Adapt an Iconic Game One Block at a Time
Adapting the iconic, block-based design aesthetic of Mojang’s beloved Minecraft videogame into the hit feature film comedy adventure, The Minecraft Movie, posed an enormous number of hurdles for director Jared Hess and Oscar-winning Production VFX Supervisor Dan Lemmon. Tasked with helping translate the iconic pixelated world into something cinematically engaging, while remaining true to its visual DNA, was Wētā FX, who delivered 450 VFX shots on the film. And two of their key leads on the film were VFX Supervisor Sheldon Stopsack and Animation Supervisor Kevin Estey.
But the shot count merely scratches the surface of the extensive work the studio performed. Wētā led the design and creation of The Overworld, 64 unique terrains spanning deserts, lush forests, oceans, and mountain ranges, all combined into one continuous environment, assets that were also shared with Digital Domain for their work on the 3rd act battle. Wētā also handled extensive work on the lava-filled hellscape of The Nether that involved Unreal Engine for early representations used in previs, scene scouting, and onset during principal photography, before refining the environment during post-production. They also dressed The Nether with lava, fire, and torches, along with atmospherics and particulate like smoke, ash, and embers.
But wait… there’s more!
The studio’s Art Department, working closely with Hess, co-created the look and feel of all digital characters in the film. For Malgosha’s henchmen, the Piglins, Wētā designed and created 12 different variants, all with individual characteristics and personalities. They also designed sheep, bees, pandas, zombies, skeletons, and lovable wolf Dennis. Many of these characters were provided to other vendors for their work on the film.
Needless to say, the studio truly became a “Master Builder” on the show.
The film is based on the hugely popular game Minecraft, first released by Sweden’s Mojang Studios in 2011 and purchased by Microsoft for 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:
In a far-ranging interview, Stopsack and Estey shared with AWN a peek into their creative process, from early design exploration to creation of an intricate practical cloak for Malgosha and the use of Unreal Engine for previs, postvis, and real-time onset visualization.
Dan Sarto: The film is filled with distinct settings and characters sporting various “block” styled features. Can you share some of the work you did on the environments, character design, and character animation?
Sheldon Stopsack: There's, there's so much to talk about and truth to be told, if you were to touch on everything, we would probably need to spend the whole day together.
Kevin Estey: Sheldon and I realized that when we talk about the film, either amongst ourselves or with someone else, we could just keep going, there are so many stories to tell.
DS: Well, start with The Overworld and The Nether. How did the design process begin? What did you have to work with?
SS: Visual effects is a tricky business, you know. It's always difficult. Always challenging. However, Minecraft stood out to us as not your usual quote unquote standard visual effects project, even though as you know, there is no standard visual effects project because they're all somehow different. They all come with their own creative ideas, inspirations, and challenges. But Minecraft, right from the get-go, was different, simply by the fact that when you first consider the idea of making such a live-action movie, you instantly ask yourself, “How do we make this work? How do we combine these two inherently very, very different but unique worlds?” That was everyone’s number one question. How do we land this? Where do we land this? And I don't think that any of us really had an answer, including our clients, Dan Lemmonand Jared Hess. Everyone was really open for this journey. That's compelling for us, to get out of our comfort zone. It makes you nervous because there are no real obvious answers.
KE: Early on, we seemed to thrive off these kinds of scary creative challenges. There were lots of question marks. We had many moments when we were trying to figure out character designs. We had a template from the game, but it was an incredibly vague, low-resolution template. And there were so many ways that we could go. But that design discovery throughout the project was really satisfying.
DS: Game adaptations are never simple. There usually isn’t much in the way of story. But with Minecraft, from a visual standpoint, how did you translate low res, block-styled characters into something entertaining that could sustain a 100-minute feature film?
SS: Everything was a question mark. Using the lava that you see in The Nether as one example, we had beautiful concept art for all our environments, The Overworld and The Nether, but those concepts only really took you this far. They didn’t represent the block shapes or give you a clear answer of like how realistic some of those materials, shapes and structures would be. How organic would we go? All of this needed to be explored. For the lava, we had stylized concept pieces, with block shaped viscosity as it flowed down. But we spent months with our effects team, and Dan and Jared, just riffing on ideas. We came full circle, with the lava ending up being more realistic, a naturally viscous liquid based on real physics. And the same goes with the waterfall that you see in the Overworld.
The question is, how far do we take things into the true Minecraft representation of things? How much do we scale back a little bit and ground ourselves in reality, with effects we’re quite comfortable producing as a company? There's always a tradeoff to find that balance of how best to combine what’s been filmed, the practical sets and live-action performances, with effects. Where’s the sweet spot? What's the level of abstraction? What's honest to the game? As much as some call Minecraft a simple game, it isn't simple, right? It's incredibly complex. It's got a set of rules and logic to the world building process within the game that we had to learn, adapt, and honor in many ways.
When our misfits first arrive and we have these big vistas and establishing shots, when you really look at it, you, you recognize a lot of the things that we tried to adapt from the game. There are different biomes, like the Badlands, which is very sand stoney; there's the Woodlands, which is a lush environment with cherry blossom trees; you’ve got the snow biome with big mountains in the background. Our intent was to honor the game.
KE: I took a big cue from a lot of the early designs, and particularly the approach that Jared liked for the characters and to the design in general, which was maintaining the stylized, blocky aesthetic, but covering them in realistic flesh, fur, things that were going to make them appear as real as possible despite the absolutely unreal designs of their bodies. And so essentially, it was squared skeleton… squarish bones with flesh and realistic fur laid over top. We tried various things, all extremely stylized. The Creepers are a good example. We tried all kinds of ways for them to explode. Sheldon found a great reference for a cat coughing up a hairball. He was nice to censor the worst part of it, but those undulations in the chest and ribcage… Jared spoke of the Creepers being basically tragic characters that only wanted to be loved, to just be close to you. But sadly, whenever they did, they’d explode. So, we experimented with a lot of different motions of how they’d explode.
DS: Talk about the process of determining how these characters would move. None seem to have remotely realistic proportions in their limbs, bodies, or head size.
KE: There were a couple things that Jared always seemed to be chasing. One was just something that would make him laugh. Of course, it had to sit within the bounds of how a zombie might move, or a skeleton might move, as we were interpreting the game. But the main thing was just, was it fun and funny? I still remember one of the earliest gags they came up with in mocap sessions, even before I even joined the show, was how the zombies get up after they fall over. It was sort of like a tripod, where its face and feet were planted and its butt shoots up in the air.
After a lot of experimentation, we came up with basic personality types for each character. There were 12 different types of Piglins. The zombies were essentially like you're coming home from the pub after a few too many pints and you're just trying to get in the door, but you can't find your keys. Loose, slightly inebriated movement. The best movement we found for the skeletons was essentially like an old man with rigid limbs and lack of ligaments that was chasing kids off his lawn. And so, we created this kind of bible of performance types that really helped guide performers on the mocap stage and animators later on.
SS: A lot of our exploration didn’t stick. But Jared was the expert in all of this. He always came up with some quirky last-minute idea.
KE: My favorite from Jared came in the middle of one mocap shoot. He walked up to me and said he had this stupid idea. I said OK, go on. He said, what if Malgosha had these two little pigs next to her, like Catholic alter boys, swinging incense. Can we do that? I talked to our stage manager, and we quickly put together a temporary prop for the incense burners. And we got two performers who just stood there. What are they going to do? Jared said, “Nothing. Just stand there and swing. I think it would look funny.” So, that’s what we did. We dubbed them the Priesty Boys. And they are there throughout the film. That was amazing about Jared. He was always like, let's just try it, see if it works. Otherwise ditch it.
DS: Tell me about your work on Malgosha. And I also want to discuss your use of Unreal Engine and the previs and postvis work.
SS: For Malgosha as a character, our art department did a phenomenal job finding the character design at the concept phase. But it was a collective effort. So many contributors were involved in her making. And I'm not just talking about the digital artists here on our side. It was a joint venture of different people having different explorations and experiments. It started off with the concept work as a foundation, which we mocked up with 3D sketches before building a model. But with Malgosha, we also had the costume department on the production side building this elaborate cloak. Remember, that cloak kind of makes 80, 85% of her appearance. It's almost like a character in itself, the way we utilized it. And the costume department built this beautiful, elaborate, incredibly intricate, practical version of it that we intended to use on set for the performer to wear. It ended up being too impractical because it was too heavy. But it was beautiful. So, while we didn't really use it on set, it gave us something physically to kind of incorporate into our digital version.
KE: Alan Henry is the motion performer who portrayed her on set and on the mocap stage. I've known him for close to 15 years. I started working with him on The Hobbit films. He was a stunt performer who eventually rolled into doing motion capture with us on The Hobbit. He’s an incredible actor and absolutely hilarious and can adapt to any sort of situation. He’s so improvisational. He came up with an approach to Malgosha very quickly. Added a limp so that she felt decrepit, leaning on the staff, adding her other arm as kind of like a gimp arm that she would point and gesture with.
Even though she’s a blocky character, her anatomy is very much a biped, with rounder limbs than the other Piglins. She's got hooves, is somewhat squarish, and her much more bulky mass in the middle was easier to manipulate and move around. Because she would have to battle with Steve in the end, she had to have a level of agility that even some of the Piglins didn't have.
DS: Did Unreal Engine come into play with her?
SS: Unreal was used all the way through the project. Dan Lemmon and his team early on set up their own virtual art department to build representations of the Overworld and the Nether within the context of Unreal. We and Sony Imageworks tried to provide recreations of these environments that were then used within Unreal to previsualize what was happening on set during shooting of principal photography. And that's where our mocap and on-set teams were coming into play. Effects provided what we called the Nudge Cam. It was a system to do real-time tracking using a stereo pair of Basler computer vision cameras that were mounted onto the sides of the principal camera. We provided the live tracking that was then composited in real time with the Unreal Engine content that all the vendors had provided. It was a great way of utilizing Unreal to give the camera operators or DOP, even Jared, a good sense of what we would actually shoot. It gave everyone a little bit of context for the look and feel of what you could actually expect from these scenes.
Because we started this journey with Unreal having onset in mind, we internally decided, look, let's take this further. Let's take this into post-production as well. What would it take to utilize Unreal for shot creation? And it was really exclusively used on the Nether environment. I don’t want to say we used it for matte painting replacement. We used it more for say, let's build this extended environment in Unreal. Not only use it as a render engine with this reasonably fast turnaround but also use it for what it's good at: authoring things, quickly changing things, moving columns around, manipulating things, dressing them, lighting them, and rendering them. It became sort of a tool that we used in place of a traditional matte painting for the extended environments.
KE: Another thing worth mentioning is we were able to utilize it on our mocap stage as well during the two-week shoot with Jared and crew. When we shoot on the mocap stage, we get a very simple sort of gray shaded diagnostic grid. You have your single-color characters that sometimes are textured, but they’re fairly simple without any context of environment. Our special projects team was able to port what we usually see in Giant, the software we use on the mocap stage, into Unreal, which gave us these beautifully lit environments with interactive fire and atmosphere. And Jared and the team could see their movie for the first time in a rough, but still very beautiful rough state. That was invaluable.
DS: If you had to key on anything, what would say with the biggest challenges for your teams on the film? You're laughing. I can hear you thinking, “Do we have an hour?”
KE: Where do you begin?
SS: Exactly. It's so hard to really single one out. And I struggle with that question every time I've been asked that question.
KE: I’ll start. I've got a very simple practical answer and then a larger one, something that was new to us, kind of similar to what we were just talking about. The simple practical one is the Piglins square feet with no ankles. It was very tough to make them walk realistically. Think of the leg of a chair. How do you make that roll and bank and bend because there is no joint? There are a lot of Piglins walking on surfaces and it was a very difficult conundrum to solve. It took a lot of hard work from our motion edit team and our animation team to get those things walking realistically. You know, it’s doing that simple thing that you don't usually pay attention to. So that was one reasonably big challenge that is often literally buried in the shadows. The bigger one was something that was new to me. We often do a lot of our previs and postvis in-house and then finish the shots. And just because of circumstances and capacity, we did the postvis for the entire final battle, but we ended up sharing the sequence with Digital Domain, who did an amazing job completing some of the stuff on the Battlefield we did post on. For me personally, I've never experienced not finishing what I started. But it was also really rewarding to see how well the work we had put in was honored by DD when they took it over.
SS: I think the biggest challenge and the biggest achievement that I'm most proud of is really ending up with something that was well received by the wider audience. Of creating these two worlds, this sort of abstract adaptation of the Minecraft game and combining it with live-action. That was the achievement for me. That was the biggest challenge. We were all nervous from day one. And we continued to be nervous up until the day the movie came out. None of us really knew how it ultimately would be received. The fact that it came together and was so well received is a testament to everyone doing a fantastic job. And that's what I'm incredibly proud of.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
#minecraft #movie #wētā #helps #adapt
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