Pharrell Williams’ Piece by Piece Was Made With Young Content Creators

Over three decades as a musician, Pharrell Williams has done things his own way, taking maverick approaches that still operate in the mainstream.

The production of his new film, it turns out, had the same philosophy.

By now you’ve likely heard of Piece by Piece, Williams’ film with Morgan Neville that sits on the line between authorized celebrity biopic, animation mold-buster and formalist doc experiment. Lesser told, however, is the story of how the film came to be: with the use of dozens of everyday artists around the world, many of whom had never before held a Hollywood gig — or any gig at all.

They connected via the L.A.-based creator platform Tongal, allowing Williams and Neville to find both quirky visions and less expensive labor. Essentially, instead of hiring a professional animation studio and guiding staffers in the ways of Lego, filmmakers sought out amateur Lego creators and organized them into an ad hoc studio.

“We didn’t have the normal Lego movie budget, so how do you make something that can play at that level visually but is cheaper to do?” Neville says.

An architecture student in France, a Lego fanboy in Poland, an Iranian refugee in Jakarta — all were among those activated and hired for the Focus Features project. Working with the animation company Pure Imagination and its guru Howard Baker, the creators had their work folded into the movie, attempting to create a consistent look with a diversity of voices. 

Hollywood and the creator economy have an awkward tango. One side has the connections, experience and money. The other has the scrappiness, freshness and giant fan followings. Can they be united?

“We believe connecting Hollywood and creators provides lots of benefit to both sides,” says Tongal founder James DeJulio, also a veteran film and TV producer. Tongal serves as a kind of platform and talent broker — a “studio on demand,” in its term.

Whether that approach is a brilliant work-around that allows mid-level players to function like Pixar or a slippery precedent that outsources traditional industry labor will become clearer as the model takes shape. For now, participating creators are only too happy for Hollywood to bless their story. THR sought out a few of them.

Nicolas Carlier

Animation wasn’t much on the mind of Carlier throughout his years at university in Paris. He was an architecture student. His goal was to build massive structures — a new Louvre, a fresh Versailles. Not bricks on a screen.

Yet everything from Piece by Piece’s poster art to its animated logo to its shots of Neville and Williams talking spring from the mind of this 26-year-old.

A longtime physical Lego hobbyist, Carlier was intrigued when he logged on to Tongal and saw a need for animators. Lego animation has some interesting contrasts with the regular kind. You have to abide by rules — the pieces have to scale and move according to the laws of physics. Of course, as an architect, Carlier was used to that.

“And once you do that, producers still give you all this creativity and freedom to do whatever you want,” he said, describing an initial process that was more like a contest or open call than top-down animation workflow.

The approach wouldn’t work everywhere. Thousands of amateur Lego animators already exist, sometimes mined by the company for social or traditional campaigns. That’s not true for other animated movies. Still, Carlier says the collaboration points to a slew of potential forward-thinking marriages between Hollywood and the creator economy.

Carlier is now so entrenched with Lego that he designed a new limited-edition set for the company. Still, he relishes the digital freedom. “If you want to do something very specific, you don’t have to worry about getting 100,000 bricks in a specific color. You just create it on the screen.”

Kamil Janko

Of the scores of people who helped to design Lego animations for Piece by Piece, one in particular stands out in the mind of animation director Baker.

“Kamil brought us a completely new idea. It looked like it was really built in Lego as opposed to a kind of Legoland,” Baker says.

That’s why the young man from Warsaw, now 28, was chosen to build some of the most realistic sets for the film, including a beach house and six blocks of New York — especially the tricky-to-re-create Washington Square Park.

Janko had been a fan of Lego videos on YouTube since he was 10. But when it came time for school, practicality called — a technical college and a future career in IT.

But he couldn’t resist the lure of stop-motion animation. He soon found himself immersed in Lego fan videos. When he saw solicitations on Tongal for a secret project, he got his designs in. Soon he not only had all these assignments but was given a budget that let him hire some 20 animators and, eventually, form his own company.

Janko’s creative approach, he said, was more stylized than some other Lego animators. “I’d rather try to reflect the idea or soul of a place than create an exact replica.”

That was helpful given some of the logistical realities.

“When we were designing, none of us had been to Washington Square Park to see the arch — none of us had even been to the U.S.,” he says. “We used Google Images.”

He pauses. 

“And Friends, of course.”

Amir Mahdi Qurbani

Even now, at 19, Qurbani remembers carrying the Lego pieces. 

When he was a young boy in Tehran, while his family tried to make a new life for themselves after fleeing Afghanistan, he would take them out and start building.

And during the past decade, displaced in Jakarta, whenever they were struggling, he and his brother would go to the bricks.

“As refugees, we never had a lot. But I always carried them around because it was something that had endless possibilities,” Qurbani says by Zoom from Indonesia. “Every day I could tell a different story with the same bricks. I could build whatever I couldn’t achieve in reality.”

Now, with digital bricks, he may be building a new future. After tinkering with Lego fan videos, Qurbani spotted a call for digital Lego creators on Tongal. He sent over some samples, and soon he was enlisted by producers to create characters for the film. About 400 of them.

From a background player with a banana-print dress to Teddy Riley, the iconic producer who discovered Pharrell, the people you see onscreen are often courtesy of this teenager working from his parents’ home in Jakarta.

So removed is Qurbani from Hollywood that he couldn’t even see the finished film in a local theater. “I don’t think it was playing here,” he says.

But his arrival on the map could set him up for other gigs; indeed, Qurbani’s story mirrors the feel-good uplift of Piece by Piece’s protagonist, with creativity as a way out of hardship.

“My family doesn’t have rights here. We’re not seen the same way,” he says. “But Pharrell also had an uncertain childhood where he was left out by other people. I see myself like that. I want to use this as an opportunity to escape and build a better life for my family.”

This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.