Behind the Scenes of Viva La Vida

Viva La Vida. A video that was the result of 5% sleepless nights and 95% procrastination, resulting in a two year production phase. Despite the fact that the production was fairly structured (to my standards at least), animating this thing took forever. I started out with a basic idea of a fallen king reminiscing his past life, ultimately joining the band for the last chorus. Every time I heard the song, I would flesh out the details a little farther, and eventually I had the completed video created mentally. So as to avoid falling under mental trauma and forgetting the whole idea, I storyboarded the video, which can be seen in the picture below. I've got a big corkboard to put that sort of thing on, so every big project gets tacked up there during production. Unfortunately, Viva had too many storyboards to fit on the board, so a couple are missing in that picture.

No joke, for the first minute and a half of the video, I made exactly lots of camera rigs. Rigs for dolly shots, rigs for panning shots, rigs for pivoted rotations, the list goes on. My favourite rig was a big square base I built out of Technic. It had a whole bunch of wheels on it and a pivot point in the center which could be placed on a regular LEGO baseplate, allowing the camera to rotate around the set that was placed on the rig. The first chorus includes the rig: "Be my mirror, my sword and shield". I can't seem to find a picture of it anywhere, but if I come across it I'll share it on the site.

Fast forward one year and we arrive at the Ohhahhhohhhs. This scene features the band members playing under spotlights, so I tried this out a couple of ways. The first method was duct taping a low powered flashlight to a lamp and then placing that above the set (with every other light turned off). This worked well for a couple shots, but the bulb died. Sad day.

The new and improved method was much more efficient, though much more fire-prone at the same time. A couple pieces of white paper were wrapped together to create a funnel and then taped to a lamp. Zach Macias used this technique in one of his own animations, and has a good picture up on his Flickr. Below is the setup I had, though the actual lamp isn't visible.

The brick wave at the beginning of the last chorus has generated a lot of comments on YouTube, and lucky for you I took a couple of pictures while I was filming the shot. The camera was set on a standard dolly rig, moving back a millimeter or two every frame, with the characters going about their actions. The actual wave was planned out beforehand. I drew out each frame's circle on LEGO graph paper, confomring to the grid lines so it could be built out of bricks. While I was animating I simply used the grids as reference and was able to make expanding circle waves. Neat!

The last shot of Viva was a tricky one. I don't have nearly enough bricks/baseplates to make a large enough field for an aerial shot, so I used miniature models blended in with the full sized version. As the digital camera zooms out, the castle fades into a miniature one, as I couldn't actually build a full castle with my collection.

I hope you learned a thing or two from this article. I know it's a bit sparse, but I simply didn't document much during the production. Lesson learned for next time.

If there is anything you would still like to know about, contact me and I'll see if I have anything that I could post here.