‘Piece by Piece’ Resets Expectations of What LEGO Movies Can Be

After just the first few seconds of the new animated documentary that follows the life 13-time Grammy winner Pharrell Williams, it’s clear this is not your typical LEGO movie.  

A LEGO-animated Williams, voiced by the musician himself, hands off his child as he gathers himself to be interviewed by the film’s director, Morgan Neville. The camera struggles to find focus and a point of center as Williams sits down in a chair opposite Neville, who holds a black brick in his hand in lieu of a notepad. The interview begins with Williams suggesting the universe may be like a LEGO set within our ability to shape and change… but only using plastic bricks that already exist.  

Neville stares at Williams in confusion, who chuckles… and the film takes off on a wild journey through the mind of an insanely creative individual who rarely thinks like everyone else. And, quite frankly, the world may be a better place for it. 

Check out the trailer here:

Co-produced and directed by Neville, known for documentaries like Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021) and Mickey: The Story of a Mouse (2022), Piece by Piece was produced by The LEGO Group, Neville's Tremolo Productions, Williams' I Am Other, Pure Imagination Studios and Tongal. The film, now in theaters, marks the fifth theatrical LEGO-based film and the first to be done as a documentary. In Neville’s opinion, as well as that of the film’s animation director, Howard E. Baker, Piece by Piece stands to change the way LEGO movies, animated films, and documentaries alike are made in the future.  

AWN sat down with Neville and Baker to discuss the film’s artistic direction, challenges with emoting LEGO characters, and how a variety of film lenses and colorscripts gave diverse seasons of Williams’ life and career a unified voice. 

Victoria Davis: One of my favorite things about this film – and it's kind of a strange little detail – is the way you guys created Pharrell’s soundtracks or sound beats with random little LEGO bits. It was really creative and interesting and gave a cool visual to the sounds. 

Morgan Neville: That was all Howard. In the earlier iterations of the film, we weren't physically seeing the beats and Howard had this idea to make them visible and observable. 

Howard E. Baker: We had a weekly story meeting with my three main storyboard artists, and in that room, we also had bowls of LEGO and LEGO minifigs. We were always playing with them and building with them. At one point, we even thought that the beats would become characters. We had this one beat that was “the Happy beat” who was following Pharrell around all the time, waiting to be discovered, and was always like, “Hey! What about me?” Those ideas never came to anything. But we were wanting to make something visual out of something that was just a sound. And, the film is a LEGO movie, but we didn't have a lot of building going on. So, we thought this was a great way to keep the theme of LEGO and have Pharrell, as he’s making the sounds in his studio, also building the track with LEGO pieces. 

VD: And what was fun was you never knew what the tracks were going to look like each time Pharrell started pulling together these pieces, which I imagine is very similar to how the artist feels when they're listening to the music a producer makes for them for the first time.

HEB: And the builds for the beats actually had to go through an approval process for specific songs. I Am Other, Pharrell’s media company, and the producers over there were all very eager to make sure these LEGO builds, these beats, were matching the songs.

VD: So, it’s not so random, after all?

MN: Not so much. And we also took into account Pharrell’s synesthesia, where he experiences colors when listening to music. So, he has some sense of what a beat would look like in terms of blocks of color. We wanted it to feel authentic to what he saw in his head. 

VD: That comes through in the film with even more than just the beat tracks. The whole film is through Pharrell’s lens and it’s so color-focused. Was that why you ultimately decided to make this using LEGO? Or was it as simple as that opening conversation in the documentary where Pharrell just says, “Hey. What if this was all just in LEGO?”

MN: The only part of the film that wasn’t just part of the normal documentary process was that opening conversation, only because I didn’t record it the first time I met him. So, when I realized we needed to have that conversation, I just said to him, “Can we kind of gameplay the first conversation we had? We'll record it like we didn't script it. Just give me your pitch.” But that first real conversation that I didn’t record, really was, “I want to do my film, and I want to do it with you, and I want to do it in LEGO.” That was it. 

VD: Howard, when you got brought on, was the idea to do this in LEGO intimidating, exciting, or a little bit of both?

HEB: Maybe a little bit of both, but definitely mostly exciting. The concept that Morgan told me was “We're going to make a rough version of this film, and then you're going to go remake it in LEGO animation.” And feeling that Morgan would be very open to our interpretation of the things that they had come up with, and that we would be processing it like a regular animated film, made it a super fun challenge and really, really fun. Anytime someone asks you to make animation you're more excited than scared, even if it even if it is a little bit scary.

VD: Isn’t this your first time working with LEGO animation. 

HEB: No. I made the first full-length LEGO feature film before The LEGO Movie called The Adventures of Clutch Powers in 2008, which released in 2010. 

VD: I’ve seen most of the LEGO animated films and, to be honest, Piece by Piece is one of my favorites. Part of that may be the documentary style, which I never get tired of. But I also think part of this film’s appeal is the incredible use of color and light, so that it's as imaginative and magical as what's going on in Pharrell's mind. How did you balance that authenticity with the fantastical nature of LEGO?

MN: We wanted it to feel familiar to the world of LEGO, but there were a lot of things we talked about at the beginning in terms of lensing. We were always experimenting with ways to make the film organic but also elevated and, as a reference, we talked about the film Moonlight a lot and its use of anamorphic lenses. It gives the movie a warm, funky look. It’s not super crisp. It uses bold colors, but they look very naturalistic. Our film also uses a lot of handheld camera work, which is not something I think animators do a ton of. 

HEB: I've worked in film and in animation a long time and we normally don't even talk so much about lensing. Maybe it's just because I've worked on smaller projects, and I haven't really been able to do something this large. But when Morgan talked about anamorphic lenses, it became our mandate. We did a real deep dive into what that would look like in animation. We wanted everything to look like it was filmed with an anamorphic lens, except for the scenes we wanted to look like they were done on Super 8. The film was shot in so many different places and there were so many different looks to it, that the anamorphic quality became the look that tied it all together.

MN: Between the lighting and the anamorphic lens, you get these amazing flares, a kind of oval bokeh of the background, all the stuff that we were going for.

VD: You’ve got different camera angles and lenses but also different color palettes. There’s a scene where Pharrell is in church, and the stained-glass window is letting off all this iridescent light as he ascends to the heavens and makes music in the clouds. Then there are very dark, monotone scenes with very little color where Pharrell is on the beach at night after losing his grandmother. 

MN: Since Pharrell sees color when he hears sound, it felt right to have colors be more saturated when he's inspired or in the zone. Then, in the moments of doubt, the colors become very desaturated. There’s a “color story” that we talked a lot about, too during production. 

VD: You also have black and white scenes and shots with different LEGO styles, like when Pharrell is watching Star Trek on the old TV and Spock is made up of older, more sharp-edged bricks. It’s a lot but it all seems to fit well together. 

MN: In a documentary, you're often montaging through time or space or years, and you can really feel the difference when you’re cutting to photos or home videos or something like that. It's pronounced. But in this movie, one of my happy discoveries was, once it all lives in the LEGO world, you don't feel the gear shifts. You just kind of go with the fact that suddenly you're looking at a photo or archive footage or something. It goes from naturalistic to surrealistic, you just kind of go with it, because it's all told in the same visual language. And that was really great. 

VD: It seems a lot of this production functioned like a well-oiled machine. Were there any challenges that stood out?

HEB: I remember a couple times Morgan would say something had to look like bad photography and the problem with animation is that if you make something look bad, people just think you've done a bad job. People think you just don’t know what you’re doing. 

VD: So, what were some solutions you guys came up with for moments like that?

HEB: A lot of that had to do with Morgan's team, really. A lot of those kind of solutions were figured out in post. 

MN: Unless you're really heavy handed about it, some shots made to look like archive footage may just feel like a mistake. There are certain sequences, some of which are based on actual archive shots, where we did a lot of experimenting with how to get the look right. And, at the end of the day, we actually exported the animation to VHS and then re-imported it. 

I'd say the first shot of the film is also us trying to announce that we're playing with a different kind of documentary grammar in the film. In that first shot, the camera swings up, Pharrell’s head is cut off, you can see the camera is racking for focus, and it misses the focus, and then lands on an angle. We wanted to establish right up top that this is not what you're used to seeing. 

HEB: Animation is generally so controlled. Every frame is designed and looked over and looked over, and there's a team of people making sure everything is just perfect in animation. Early on, when we first got our first few sequences in animation from the studios overseas who were used to a kid’s TV model, their Pharrell Williams was so happy-go-lucky, like a Disney cartoon. We had to get people to animate LEGO characters in a way where they weren’t just happy or just mad all the time. 

VD: You don’t want it to look like they just got out of plastic surgery. 

MN: The most frequent note I gave was “Stop smiling.”

VD: But getting LEGO characters to emote complex emotions must have been another challenge. Do you think camera work helped with conveying those feelings? Like those moments when a character says something, and the camera stays on them for an extra few seconds. This movie does a lot of that, and it helps audiences really sit with what Pharrell and the others are saying. 

MN: That’s great to hear! I've heard that from other people too, which is great. In the first big emotional moment of Pharrell’s, when Pharrell cries in the interview, the fact that we then blocked it and staged it with the people he’s talking to showing up around him, that underlines the emotion of that moment. And then cutting not only to me, but the rest of the crew who are all choked up too, helps us understand the idea of the reaction shot, which I love using.

VD: A quote I really loved in the film, which Pharrell says after making a track for Gwen Stefani that serves as a bridge between two musical worlds, was “The common thread between different worlds is a feeling.” Do you feel like the film also achieves that being a bridge between animation and documentary filmmaking?

MN: On all films, I try to channel the subject into the way the story is told. But on a film like this, that's so uncharted in terms of its approach, there's no instruction manual for this LEGO set. But we listened to what Pharrell talked about, and it shaped how we approach the storytelling. This film breaks a lot of rules, but it was greatly liberating.

HEB: Animation is really broadening its scope these days and I hope people will continue to grow their idea and their palette of what a LEGO movie can be.

Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.