A Minecraft Moviewas faced with the tough prospect of having to recreate the game’s signature ‘blocky’ look while adapting it to blend with live-action sequences. This was no easy task, but the movie has proved to be a hit with fans so far, commanding a strong performance at the box office thanks to its feel-good tone and a refusal to take itself seriously. Jack Black and Jason Momoa add a dose of star power to proceedings for good measure, while visual effects company Weta was used forA Minecraft Movie’s plethora of digital creations.
Game Rant caught up with Weta’s VFX supervisor Sheldon Stopsack and animation supervisor Kevin Estey, both of whom played key roles inadaptingMinecraft’s iconic lookfor the big screen.This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Weta’s Learning Journey Explained
Q: What was the learning experience like for your team when you started the project?
Estey:There was a huge learning process for both of us. Neither of us werehardcoreMinecraftfansgoing into it. I did get into playing it with my son, who’s 14, but was 12 when I started. He showed me the road, and I started to learn more about it. But Sheldon has said repeatedly that we were not the experts in the room during production. We had to listen to the fans, both within our crew and outside the crew. And then, of course, we were always getting input from Mojang and Microsoft and everyone who was just trying to make sure we were staying within a certain subset of criteria, but still with creative freedom to kind of branch out and make this world exist through a new lens. T
There were certain rules though, and sometimes it was like, okay, now we’re taking our creativity too far. There were rules we had to live by, so that was a fun learning process for all of us. It was an ongoing learning process. We definitely started with designs of the characters we knew going into it, the characters that were going to be represented. Some new ones came up along the way, as needs arose. But for the most part, we went into it knowing there were going to be piglins, for example. There were going to be a wide variety of them too, to sort of fill out The Nether. We ended up with about11 different types of piglins, not including Malgosha, and that was to distinguish them, so they didn’t all seem like cookie-cutter versions.
It went so far as that each one had individual names, which really helped define their personalities. There were three subsets of sizes. There were the squealers, the small ones, the grunts, the medium-sized and the large ones, the brutes. Then we gave them names like snowball and snortilla, things like that, to set them apart from each other. Then, of course, we knew we had the zombies, skeletons, spiders, bees, sheep, and cows too.
How Malgosha’s Design Was Conceived
Q: Can you walk us through the process of designing the movie’s villain, Malgosha, who is an original character?
Estey:We knew Malgosha was going to be one of the biggest design challenges. We also knew that a lot of design attention was going to go to her because she was unique. We were sent a lot of material from different types ofMinecraftproperties, both from the game and also some kind of animated side stories that had been done. I remember this image of a character that looks somewhat like Malgosha, and it was a side story fromtheMinecraftuniverse. The idea for her sort of started with that.
Malgosha was a challenge, and so was Dennis, who was a key character. We knew the source of him, but we knew he had to interact with human characters in a much more emotive way than pretty much any other digital character. So that was kind of like what we knew going in. And then it was the learning process of anything from, like, what types of blocks or bricks would stick and float or fall, so that we make sure we don’t put, like, dirt on the side of wood without anything under, things like that.
There were things that would come up along the way that we would be made aware of, and then we’d work them into the movie. For example, I don’t know where it came up, but I think there might have been someone in Mojang who said there are times when thebows of skeletons glow purple. It’s rare, but our director Jared likes the look of it, and all of a sudden all the bows would glow purple, just because, as long as it happens in the game at some point, we can use it as a visual tool. So things like that were part of the learning process among many others.
Q: How did you balance the kind of blocky, iconic style ofMinecraftwith the need for realism?
Estey:Well, we had the inherent built-in aspect of it being based on blocks. Even though thecharacters that exist inMinecraftmight be seen as low resolution, there is still that inherent ‘blockiness’ that is derived from the blocks of the game. So that’s an aesthetic that needed to exist. There was even this design of a creeper that we saw a fan do at one point, or maybe it was actually done by Mojang and Microsoft, but it was a cross-section of a creeper, and you could see a square rib cage, square skull, and they had the ticking time bomb. And so you got this sense of like, square bone structure. But in order to make them sit in the same world as live action, human characters that were not stylized, we had to make the look and feel of them at the same threshold and level of fidelity and reality as the human character.
So one ofMinecraft’s most famous antagonists, the piglins, for example, their skin was based heavily on real pig skin, and we studied it a lot, down to the pores and the sweat and the dirt. The hair, flaky skin, everything! It was pretty realistic, really up close. So that level of realism helped set them in the world and Jared really liked the idea of making them even beyond having just a fleshy exterior, like truly making them fleshy and flabby. Having that juxtaposition of the rigid, square structure and, for lack of a better word, the grotesque exterior. We took that logic and applied it to the other characters too.
Designing and Animating The Nether
Q: Can you talk about the process of designing and animating The Nether and how you captured its intense atmosphere?
Estey:The Nether is the antithesis of the Overworld. The Overworld is a beautiful, sunny environment, the Nether is dark and chaotic, hot and steamy. We have a history of doing dungeons and darker things at Weta, so it was something that we have a lot of experience doing. In terms of the design, there were some basic rules to follow. Take the lava waterfalls, the pinnacles and pillars that were all around, like we sort of had some basic structures that we could then modularly move throughout to sort of build out the deep background.
The focus was Malgosha’s Throne Room, everything sort of pivoted around that. There was a lot of experimentation done with how blocky we made certain aspects that are not necessarily blocky in terms of the real world, but it’s that sort of hybrid area. There were tests done of lava waterfalls, using 1000s of blocks, but done in a liquid form. But it just looked very pixelated, very kind of overly stylized. So the lava became more or less just like lava, but it was flowing over square structures, so it still gave it that kind of rigid substructure, similar to the creatures as well. They mainly had rigid bone, a square shape, but soft flesh on top. It was all about constant experimentation, trying out different things.
When you translate this world to high resolution, we would often speak to the notion that we have a good guide to the game. But it is a very low resolution and very vague canvas. There’s a lot of filling in that we need to do, whether it be literal or experimentally. So we always tried to ensure we put everything possible out there to end on what was the best way forward, as opposed to just thinking we knew what was the best. Then, when it came toanimating in the Nether, it was really about trying to figure out piglin-type behavior, which we worked on with Jared.
He liked the idea of them being kind of like the Three Stooges, although it was a lot more than three. But their behavior was just, they were basically mindless drones, essentially, who are just driven by their greed for gold and at all costs, even if it meant knocking their fellow piglins off the edge so they could get to the gold. We did a lot of motion tests early with some performers, with Jared there, of them just doing Three Stooges-type gags, and he just loved that sort of stuff. It was great because then we had a guide for their characteristics. We used that, combined with those 11 different piglin types,piglin personalities, really, to figure out how to set up these different vignettes that would then fill out The Nether.
How much should we fill out was the other question. Early on, Sheldon and I made the call. Let’s just see how much we could fill it out with, because there was no rule on how many piglins there were in the Nether. We have great motion editors and a crowd department that can do large-scale crowds. So we just started to fill out mid-background, deep background and then extra deep. It just gave it more and more life the deeper you went with that filling out. So I think the shot with the largest number of characters was a shot in the Nether where there’s almost 2500 piglins in a single shot. You don’t see all of them real well, but they’re all there, and it just gives it that sense of life.
How Weta Brought Minecraft’s World to Life
Q: Were there any unique visual effects techniques or innovations that were developed specifically for A Minecraft Movie?
Stopsack:Obviously, theaesthetic of theMinecraftworld is unique. So for us to really figure out how to find the sweet spot of combining this with a live action component and real world actors, it warranted us to really figure out exactly how we wanted to build this world. This was a creative challenge, firstly, but it also came with technicalities, and that’s where our development of new methodologies and approaches kicked in a little bit. Our model team, in conjunction with the layout team, and the pre-production group, really stuck their heads together early on to explore avenues of what it would mean to kind of build the world out of blocks effectively, akin to what we would really do in the game.
We had a very similar mindset from the get-go that we wanted to think about it a little bit like the game, to kind of honor it. We ended up developing a tool which is called the Blockz tool, which was really sort of a semi-procedural approach for building large-scale assets for environments and terrain and things like that. Very similar to what you would do in the game, but obviously our needs were slightly different. The way this works, just to explain it really briefly, is you have a sort of input geometry, which could be an organic shape of a cliff or a mountain. The Blockz tool voxelized this input geometry, and we created a point cloud from it. Then, at that point cloud we were able to insert thesedifferent material blocks. So we created a blocky representation of an input asset, effectively.
The reason I said semi-procedural earlier is because that obviously gets you to a very stylized aesthetic right from the get-go. But we needed more from this. So we built all kinds of controls into it that gave us control over different scales and sizes of blocks. What we learned pretty quickly was if we stayed true to the game, and we limited ourselves to a meter by meter block size. If you build a mountain for a deep background, you’re not going to see it, because it effectively becomes like a sub-pixel. You don’t even notice that it’s made out of blocks anymore. So we needed to introduce really creative controls into that process, into that methodology and the tool helped us to really find the appropriate scale, etc.
If there was one thing that was true about this project, it was that we couldn’t paint our way out of it. There was no way that we could treat backgrounds or extended environments as matte paintings. Everything needed to essentially be physically built as an asset. It was a big undertaking and that tool set was incredibly helpful. The pre-production team did an amazing job there, and it allowed us to kind of flesh out and spin ideas reasonably quickly. Ultimately, the goal was to create an aesthetic that was suitable for the audience and themovie’s live-action component.
How A Minecraft Movie Tackles The Balance Between The Overworld and The Nether
Q: With regard to the balance between live action and digital, if we take the Overworld as an example, how much of that set was completely digital?
Stopsack:It’s probably fair to say there was a true mixture between live-action and digital. So the set design and the production design have done an incredible job. I’ve got to say, when we first stepped on the set, and we saw some of the overall components, we had these big trees and tree trunks. It was pretty extensive, but it really varied because it depended on the scene, on the sequence. Sometimes there was more of a live set, the presence of practical tools etc., and sometimes there was less.
I think the final battle was probably easy to kind of single out because it was a pretty basic set. It was literally just flat terrain, some burned tree trunks and a minimal amount of set dressing. I don’t want to brag or anything, but it was a pretty extensive CGI extension from there. To be fair,every set had its fair share of green screens. There was a world for us to create for the fans, and we needed to get it just right. It was beautiful.
Q: How much did you have to consult with Mojang throughout the process? Did you check in with them regularly to make sure that you were getting everything right in terms of the game’s lore etc.?
Stopsack:Mojang was present throughout. They were incredible, because they were very, very forthcoming, very helpful with their input, and willing to share their knowledge.Minecraftis a world all of its ownand there’s an entire world of knowledge. It was a world of rules and things that you could get really wrong. We were all very cautious of going into this process while not necessarily beingMinecraftexperts. My daughter is probably better and more savvy! We went into it trying to be careful not to make mistakes. What I found super refreshing in the process of making this movie was that there were so many people around us that had a wealth of knowledge, we were genuinely no longer the experts in the room, because we had teams all around us who knew more.
Even one of our asset guys, a model artist. He’s an absoluteMinecraftgeek, and it was beautiful to have him, because he could teach us so many things. Whenever we gave a comment or a note like, oh, let’s do this, he would be like, sorry, I want to interrupt you for a second, but in the game, it’s actually not like that. We learned a thing or two!TheMinecraftcommunitythat we had on site was helpful. Mojang was incredibly helpful. They were super forthcoming, sharing all their knowledge. We had style guides and cheat sheets of information to help us flesh out this world. It was very helpful. That’s not to say that we didn’t bend the rules, because there are certain creative licenses and liberties that were taken. But it was always, always in conjunction with Mojang being comfortable with what we were doing.
I think one of the things that we learned as well is the fact thatMojang was very in tune with the fans. During the creation of the movie, there were moments where the work felt reactionary to fans’ desires. I think, generally speaking, when you’re working in this realm, you are expected to stick to your guns. You have to do what you trust. But this was the first time we realized it. I don’t know if it’s generational or because it’s game-related, but there was more consideration.
There was much more consideration for the fans and what the fans were thinking and would want. I think in the past, we might have thought that it’s been a bit weak, that’s not sticking to the tried-and-tested, whereas this was a new process for us, and it was really refreshing to see how well that works in this world, because it is all about the fans, so it was great to sort of be a part of that.
Weta on Proudest Achievement Throughout the Project
Q: A lot of work has clearly got into this, and the movie has already seen some great success. If there’s one thing that you could say you’re most proud of throughout this whole project, what would you say that it was and why?
Estey:For me, personally, this was one of the most fun and creatively rewarding projects I’ve worked on.Fun is key inA Minecraft Movie, and I kept trying to lean into making it more fun and have fun and be silly, because at the end of the day, that’s the type of director Jared is, and that’s the type of project he wanted this to be. We tried to inject as much of that silliness and ridiculousness into what we were doing in motion and creating characters, behavioral types etc. We also tried to create that experience for the animators and let them know that this movie is silly. We’re making pandas do the running man!
We should always remind ourselves of that and let that become our guide and our sort of moral compass when we’re working on this project. As a result, the other side of that pride is seeing the fans and people in the theater. I’m not talking about themost extreme behavior people are displaying, but, people are getting it, you know? And it really felt like everything that we thought this movie could be and should be is working. It’s silly, it’s fun, and that’s what movies like this should be.
Stopsack:I tend to agree with a lot of aspects that Kevin is pointing out there. There are so many other things that I would probably easily single out, but I think the underlying structure is the silliness and the fun, the fact that this project was outside of our usual comfort zone. It wasn’t your day-to-day business that you would typically do. And I think what we should all be proud of is that as a group, really collectively. It was always like, okay, look, this is unique. This is special. Let’s really grab the bull by the horns and live and breathe it from start to finish. It was tough. I’m not going to lie.
And really, to kind of touch on one more thing there, it was also so challenging that everything needed to be discovered. There was no clear answer in terms of what things would look like or what they would do in this movie. Every aspect had to be figured out from a creative point of view. So I’m super proud that we managed to get through this from start to finish and continuously push this sort of creative aspect, and had that fun as a group, as a team. And, yeah, it was an amazing team!
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