the LEGO Movie_part 01 (WIldstyle)

A couple of years ago the directors of “the LEGO Movie” (Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Chris McKay) asked if I might join them in the design and development process. After they gave me a brilliant pitch of the film’s story, I knew I had to be part of it. My assignment: Help to “find” the main characters…design wise, personality wise…etc. They already had quite a bit of amazing development work done by that point, but they wanted me to look at it all, and see where I might take it? What did I like, what did I think t could be funnier or clearer...etc. Shake it up.
Everyone was pretty happy with where the design of Emmet Brickowski (the star of the film) was, and I could not have agreed more, So my priorities were: Lucy Lego (Wildstyle), Vitruvius (the blind wizard), and President Business . I started with Lucy.
Lucy (Wildstyle) was conceived as a rebel with a tendency to try a little to hard (in life and in looks). There was a lot of discussion on what that could mean visually, and above are just a few of my early explorations. From Military to Punk to Rockabilly, we played with lots of symbols and details that might give more insight into her and her world. In some images I tried incorporating elements like crayon marks to act as tattoos, war paint, or graffiti. For others I tried incorporating real world objects like stickers and toothpicks…etc. We knew that the real world was going to come into play in the film ( IE: the Kragle), and that a human little sister might even have an affect on the LEGO world (though the audience would not discover this until late in the film), so these real world elements were experimented with on all of the character’s. But Lucy was a lot of fun to explore. I’ll share a bit about Vitruvius and President Business in upcoming posts.