Preymaker
Denmark
- Original Content
- Design
Project Denmark began as a playful experiment with LEGO-inspired characters and quickly evolved into a fully realized real-time animated short that blends creativity, craft, and technical innovation. Using Unreal Engine, custom rigs, and tools like Brickmaker, Preymaker’s team brought expressive minifigs and complex builds to life—from cinematic performances to brick-by-brick explosions—while maintaining real-time interactivity and polish. By integrating community assets, procedural workflows, and stop-motion-inspired animation, the team crafted a world that is both playful and cinematic, demonstrating how experimentation, precision, and technical ingenuity can transform a small idea into a large-scale storytelling achievement.
With all the noise about AI taking over and making humans obsolete, Preymaker decided to forego the AI prompt and embrace filmmaking craft and the artists behind it. While we wanted to give a shout out to the 30th anniversary of Michael Mann’s classic heist film Heat, Denmark actually took root as an experiment in rigging and animation.
Craft meets innovation, experimentation and new technologies
Our team built a prototype rigging system to see just how expressive LEGO-inspired characters could be inside Unreal Engine. Once the first rig was working, we couldn’t resist testing it in action. That simple test set the stage for a real-time animated short with entertaining twists, turns and thrills featuring characters akin to Heat’s famous alpha male stars - Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro and the late Val Kilmer.
With the idea in motion we started sketching. Rough storyboards helped us explore shot ideas and visual rhythm. These boards quickly evolved into layouts in Maya, where we blocked out compositions and camera angles before moving into Unreal. This gave us a strong foundation while leaving room for discovery.
Looking back, starting with a script would have streamlined the process, but the extra rounds of boards and layouts helped us find the story’s flow. The challenge was always the same: balancing clarity of action with playful, cinematic compositions.
A Banana and a Breakthrough
The very first animation was a playful sequence: a brick-based minifig dodging gunfire, ducking behind a tree and returning fire, only to reveal the attacker as another minifig in a banana costume. What began as a quick test to stress-test the rig ended up sparking the entire project.
The short clip proved two things: our tools could deliver expressive, cinematic performances, and the stop-motion inspired style felt perfect for the LEGO-inspired world. In just one week, that banana gag transformed from a fun side experiment into the foundation of Denmark.
To give the minifigs real personality, we needed more than basic rigs. Instead of relying on textures for faces, we created a pseudo-2D rig that let animators achieve movie-style expressions directly on the geometry.
Animation & Performance
We developed a custom tool that transformed these expressive rigs into lightweight versions optimized for Unreal. This meant animators could work freely while keeping everything real-time ready. The result was a workflow that saved time, avoided technical bottlenecks and delivered the playful performances that became the heart of the film.
Part of the fun of this project was tapping into the creativity of the global LEGO fan community. Using Houdini, we ingested the publicly curated LDraw library of 25,000+ LEGO pieces, cleaned them up and optimized them for Unreal. This gave us a complete digital kit of parts to build with.
For assemblies, we worked directly with Bricklink Studio, where community-made sets and custom designs could be imported and polished for our scenes.
We also built a custom tool called Brickmaker.
By voxelizing input geometry, the system stacked bricks from the ground up, filling volumes with large pieces first and then refining with smaller or sloped ones.
This meant we could instantly generate anything from a million-brick hero model to a lightweight version for background crowds. It kept the look authentic while giving us enormous flexibility.
Preparing assets for Unreal involved working with millions of bricks. No small task. Instancing each one individually slowed Unreal to a crawl, so we clustered them into larger assets, culled unseen pieces and used Nanite to handle the scale.
Consistent texel density across assets meant our uber shader could procedurally add details like fingerprints and surface variation, without the need for baked textures. Large builds like starships were merged into single assets, while movable parts stayed separate for animation control.
This approach kept performance smooth while preserving the detail and flexibility we needed.
Climactic Explosion Scene
One of the film’s most memorable moments was the brick-by-brick explosion which involved simulation and realtime paired to perfection. Rather than simulating hundreds of individual pieces, our team found a smarter way. We merged the entire effect into a single evolving point cloud in Houdini, with attributes controlling when and how each brick appeared. This kept the look consistent and manageable, while still delivering the spectacular scale we wanted.
Inside Unreal, Niagara rebuilt the effect directly from this data, ensuring every brick matched perfectly with our Houdini setup. And because the animation was designed in a stop‑motion style, the pieces popped into place frame by frame, keeping the sequence playful and stylized.
In total, Denmark contained 44 unique shots across four sequences. We approached each sequence like a miniature set, using sublevels for lighting setups and overrides for per-shot tweaks. This mirrored familiar VFX workflows while taking advantage of Unreal’s speed.
Lighting
All lighting was fully interactive, powered by hardware-accelerated Lumen. This meant no baking, immediate feedback and the freedom to experiment. The director and lighting artist often engaged in virtual location scouting, moving cameras and lights around inside Unreal to discover entirely new shots.
Everything was managed in an ACES color environment, ensuring a polished, cinematic look that integrated seamlessly with finishing.
Overcoming Challenges
Working at our toy-like scale caused issues with precision, lighting and rigging. Our solution was a Master Blueprint that let us scale assets globally or per shot, without redoing animation.
Other hurdles included heavy bullet volleys, mismatched timing between Unreal systems and motion blur artifacts from animating on 2’s. Each one was solved with a creative workaround, from Alembic clusters to custom caching, ensuring the final film stayed true to its style while running smoothly in-engine.
Denmark director Robert Petrie said: “As with any new pipeline or creative tool, there’s a learning curve, and building processes from the ground up inevitably takes time. Like most short films, this one carried a degree of overambition, but in many ways, that’s exactly what a project like this should be. From our experience, if a piece of original content feels too easy to make, it often means it’s not pushing boundaries in the right way.”
By building custom tools, tapping into community assets and pushing real-time workflows to new limits, we brought a stop-motion world to life at an unprecedented scale.
Impact
What started as a playful banana gag grew into a fully realized short film, a blend of creative vision and technical innovation.
Post Perspective was the first to curate Denmark, which will make its festival debut at New York Shorts International Film Festival this Fall.