Most of the effects in Pancake Island consisted of facial animation, something I hadn't yet tried at the time. I used a phoneme technique, meaning I drew out different mouth shapes for every vocal sound. This tutorial should give you a pretty good idea of how it goes down. In total I made about 20 mouth shapes for each character, each one modeled off of the original minifig head.

Once all of the mouths were animated and the actual production footage filmed, I tracked the faces onto the characters by hand. A couple plugins were used to map the faces onto a cylinder, but once that was done I had to position and rotate each face to correctly match up with the footage I shot. To ensure the size and shape was correct, at the beginning of every take, I took a single picture with the original head so that in post I could align the digital version.

Applying the digital face to the guide was almost identical to the other two characters. The only difference was that some masking had to be done on the hair so that the eyebrows wouldn't overlap. Not that anyone ever noticed or cared about that.

The title sequence was a really easy effect that looked kind of neat. All it involved was creating a track (using After Effects) on the animated island shot and applying that tracking data to a title I made in Photoshop.

The flying sequence was the most sophisticated part of the whole video. It utilized After Effect's 3D abilities and a crapload of animated layers. Before doing any effects work, several shots were taken. This included static clouds (from the side and above), Pancake Island from above, a blank piece of blue bristol board, and animated versions of the two characters. All of these elements were arranged in 3D space (inside After Effects) with a 3D camera. I rotoscoped each element (including the animated characters), and then animated everything using computer keyframes. It took a long time, but it was a whole lot more fun than doing that science homework I was supposed to do.

The door opening shot also used After Effects' 3D capabilites. The only part of the shot that is real is a single frame I took of the two characters looking at the camera. I found a couple wood textures online and then animated them in 3D space to look like a giant wooden door. It's simple stuff but it looks pretty nifty.

Aaaand finally is the choir. If you've already read the VFX Breakdown of my Halo video you already know how I did this shot. During production, I took a picture of a single character in every position. In Photoshop I simply masked around each frame so that only the character remained. Repeat this process for hours and eventually you've got a big huge Lego choir from a single minifig.