Lego 'McLaren'
Race — Physics, Snow, and a Car I've Always Loved
Jul 16, 2023
2 min read
Director: Ellen Kuras
Prod. Company: The Corner Shop
Agency: Droga5 Dublin
Client: Lego
The third commercial gave us something to get properly excited about: a full-scale LEGO® racing car, behaving like a real one.
By this point in the production, the machine was running smoothly. The shader and texture libraries we'd built from the ground up — standardised LEGO® materials, the imperfection maps, the brick-level surface detail — were all in place and proven. The character rigs were solid. The pipeline between Rohtau and Gabha's Nuke and Flame teams was humming. In many ways, this was the commercial where we got to reap what we'd spent the earlier spots sowing.
The creative challenge here was a specific and genuinely interesting one: honesty. Not stylisation, not cartoon physics — but a sincere attempt to ask what a real-dimension LEGO®-brick car would actually do when pushed. How would it handle? How would the mass distribute? How would it move through the world with the weight and rigidity those materials imply, even at a scaled-up size? Getting that right required the kind of animation thinking that sits at the intersection of physics simulation and performance — finding the believability within the fantasy.
And then, naturally: snow. Snow had already become something of a signature of the Holiday spot, where the Houdini simulation work had been extensive and the results deeply satisfying. Here it returned as a dynamic element — not a landscape to populate, but an active surface for the car to interact with, throw up, carve through. Two spots in, the team had developed a real instinct for how to art-direct snow simulation at this scale, and it shows.
The compositing, handled as ever by Gabha's team in Nuke on our AWS infrastructure, benefited from all the templating and tooling built earlier in the project. Shots moved quickly. The output was clean.
Sometimes the best creative work happens when the groundwork is so solid that you can stop thinking about infrastructure and just make something great. This was one of those moments.