Piece by Piece VFX Showreel

This showreel gathers the animation and visual-effects work Terminal FX contributed to Piece by Piece, Morgan Neville’s 2024 documentary about Pharrell Williams, told from end to end in LEGO. Nothing in the reel begins as photography; it is a look at wholly constructed shots: brick build, character animation, lighting and surfacing, and effects re-expressed in plastic.

Animating in bricks removes the usual escape routes. A minifigure has a fixed set of joints and no facial rig beyond a printed expression, so the performance has to arrive through timing, posture, head angle and the cut — the acting lives in the choreography rather than the face. Anything a character touches must exist as a buildable object, which pushes environment work towards architecture: sets assembled from parts that could plausibly click together, dressed at a scale where a single stud becomes the unit of measurement. Surfacing carries its own trap, since plastic without the right specular falloff, mould lines and small injection flaws reads as generic CG on sight. Effects obey the same rule — what would normally be simulated as fluid has to be spoken in parts. Terminal FX contributed animation and visual effects to Piece by Piece, and this reel is that share of the work.