An India-based team at Zebu Animation Studios has brought Pharrell Williams’ life story to the screen in Piece by Piece, a LEGO-animated feature directed by Morgan Neville. Using Unreal Engine 5, they built 121 environments and 600 characters to visualize Williams’ synesthesia and journey from Virginia Beach projects to global music icon, showcasing India’s rising power in high-end animation.
Zebu Animation Studios brought Piece by Piece to life through LEGO animation, in collaboration with Pure Imagination Studios. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville and presented by Focus Features, the film traces Pharrell Williams' journey from the housing projects of Virginia Beach to becoming one of the most influential producers and songwriters in American music.
India's animation industry has been growing steadily for years. But the leap it has made recently, and its real potential in the global market, still goes largely unnoticed. The country’s animation and VFX sector alone is projected to hit almost USD 2.2 billion, up sharply from USD 1.3 billion in FY23, while the broader AVGC ecosystem — Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics — is expected to reach USD 6.6 billion in the same period. India isn't just participating in the global animation market anymore. It's becoming one of its major driving forces.
Creating animation is a demanding undertaking on its own, but what makes Piece by Piece's journey particularly unique isn't just that it reimagines someone's entire life story in LEGO. It's that every single animated frame was brought to life in India.
Piece by Piece didn't start as an animated film — it began as a conventional documentary. It was Williams who pushed for something different, one that could reflect how he actually experiences the world. The artist has synesthesia, a neurological condition that lets him see music as color and shape, and it was this, his own way of perceiving sound, that led to the idea of retelling his life in LEGO, quite literally, piece by piece. That unconventional idea became the film's defining creative choice.
But, viewing Piece by Piece simply as a story of Williams’ emergence as an artist overlooks the sheer scale behind it.
To bring his story to the screen, tracking him from childhood to his rise as a hip-hop icon, across every defining era of his career, the studio built 121 environments, 600 characters, and 88 versions of the artist himself. Even the smallest details carried their own complications — standard LEGO minifigures don't have ears, so touches like his pink cap, styled to match his signature scissor haircut, and Missy Elliott's gold hoops each had to be custom-built from scratch.
Zebu Animation Studios collaborated with their long-term partners, L.A. based Pure Imaginations Studios, and an early adopter of Unreal Engine, to bring the concept to life. The first challenge was translating real people and real locations from William’s life into a LEGO world. The team started with a palette of 45, but capturing more nuanced skin tones required introducing additional colours beyond the original set.
The film also recreates real locations from Williams’ life — Virginia Beach, rooms from his grandmother’s home, the apartment he grew up in — using Unreal Engine's Blueprint Graph and Procedural Material System. For larger environments like Virginia Beach, the team relied on Nanite to place proxy LEGO builds that automatically swapped in highly detailed geometry, creating a node-based workflow that dramatically cut down manual assembly. Procedural Content Generation was used to build all 121 environments consistently, encoding brick-by-brick logic so each one stayed true to how a real LEGO set could actually be built.
To capture LEGO's signature shiny plastic look, the team turned to Path Tracer calculating reflections and refractions ray by ray for accuracy that approximation couldn’t match. Lumen, meanwhile, brought real-world lighting accuracy to the environments. The team fed in the exact geographic coordinates of real locations like like Virginia Beach, so the sun was placed at a physically accurate angle for every scene.
One of the film’s most meaningful recreations is the studio where Williams first started making music — a space that burned down years ago — rebuilt entirely from a single surviving black-and-white photograph. Because so much of the story lived in these physical spaces, the team needed the LEGO bricks themselves to look convincingly fresh under lighting. Unreal Engine’s Path Tracer calculated light ray by ray, while its global illumination, transmission and multi-layer reflection systems worked together to give the illusion of physical, tactile bricks.
The production’s timeline happened to align with Unreal Engine’s rollout of Movie Render Queue, which the team adopted almost immediately. This feature took the per-frame render time for 90 minutes worth of animation to minutes instead of hours.
Unreal Engine’s virtual cinematography tools also let the team replicate real-world film optics to control focal length, depth of field and lens distortion, so it could frame shots with the same cinematic language and physical realism as in a real-world shoot.
Rendering Williams’ synesthesia visually meant animating the colour behind every detail, with no real-world reference to draw from. Sequencer made this possible, letting the team animate light itself to portray the colours he sees — replicating its intensity and movement, and syncing it precisely to the music and his emotions. The same tool feature also allowed the synesthesia sequences and transform in step with the sound track.
The story of Zebu Animation Studios’ work on this film isn’t just about building a major animated feature in LEGO. It carries a much bigger purpose: proving to Indian and global audiences alike that animation of this scale, quality and craft can be achieved in India. Piece by Piece stands as proof of exactly that — a demonstration of how Indian animation studios can rise on their own merit, while carving out a real, lasting presence in the global animation ecosystem.
Piece by Piece premiered at the 51st Telluride Film Festival in August 2024, and went on to win the Truly Moving Picture Award at the 2024 Heartland Film Festival, as well as Music Documentary - Special Program at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards that November.
“The film set a new standard for what we could do for animation at a feature scale. It really pushed the global envelope. And it's us, Indian artists, that were behind that,” says Rakshit Hoskote, CG Supervisor, Zebu Animation Studios.