We caught The LEGO Movie on Monday - and loved it!

In between work and singing Everything Is Awesome - we've been checking out some of the technical behind-the-scenes posts that the teams at Animal Logic have released.

Animation Mentor's interview with LEGO Movie's lighting supervisor Craig Welsh has us hooked. With a team of 45 - including three lighting leads, a handful of compositors and six technical directors who wrote tools, and developed Glimpse, a custom renderer.

We knew we wanted a photorealistic look and we had a PRMan-based pipeline with physically plausible shading, so we began using that. It gave us a beautiful look, but by the time we finished a test shot we had worked long hours and we were exhausted. We learned that we needed to rethink our approach. We needed to accelerate the ray tracing to handle the heavy geometry. We had tens of millions of polygons, huge amounts of geometry. We needed to render it efficiently. But, there was already a strong agreement about the visual look we had established with PRMan. We couldn’t divert from that. We had to maintain the same look.

And as if Craig's interview wasn't enough of an insight - FXGuide caught up with Pablo Plaisted (Cinematographer), Aidan Sarsfield (CG Supervisor), Grant Freckelton (Production Designer) from Animal Logic to talk through more of the process!