Defocusing Bricks with Bokeh, Animal Logic and The Lego Movie

Julien Leveugle, Compositing Supervisor for Animal Logic’s The Lego Movie, took some time to share details with us about Bokeh’s involvement with the production.

“We used Bokeh extensively on The Lego Movie, due to the miniature nature of the Lego figurines we went for a shallow depth of field look. I would say that about 90% of the shots of the movie contain Bokeh one way or an other, sometimes used to achieve extremely shallow depth of field.”

 “An anamorphic custom kernel image was used throughout the show to keep a consistent look with the Bokeh node itself encapsulated in a Lego Lens group containing about 8 instances of it (since we were also defocusing the grade mattes). The group allowed us to control various aspects such as chromatic aberration, lens breathing, fstop offsets and visualisation modes with the ability to control which channels were being defocused in the gui as opposed to what was being defocused at rendertime.”

“Overall I think that Bokeh did an excellent job on the show and was a fundamental part of the look of this movie”.

Thank you for the details Julien and congratulations on the success of the project!