A Minecraft Movie’s very first clip is all about crafting.
Minecraft players got their very clip from A Minecraft Movie this week outside of the teaser trailer that was released earlier this month, and naturally, the scene is all about crafting. The clip in question stars Jack Black’s portrayal of Steve showing us and the newcomers to the Overworld, Jason Momoa as Garrett and Sebastian Hansen as Henry, how crafting works in the world of Minecraft. And for those who may have had some reservations already about the Minecraft movie after the first footage, you’ll be happy to hear that the crafting process seems to have had a lot of thought put into it.
This Minecraft Movie clip starts around the 4:51 mark in the longer video below featuring Mojang’s creative director of entertainment Torfi Olafsson and director Jared Hess. The pair talked about the work that went into A Minecraft Movie with special attention paid to ensuring the portrayal of the Overworld was cubic in nearly every way possible with the same attention offered to the crafting table.
Steve is a resident of the Overworld in A Minecraft Movie while the other characters are just visitors, so he explains to them how crafting works. Similar to how it is in Minecraft, all you need is a crafting table, some materials, and knowledge of a recipe used to make something. A quick swing of the hammer was added to the movie as a homage to the hammer and saw symbols shown hanging on the side of the in-game crafting table, and after all that’s done, you’ve got a sword.
One aspect of the clip worth pointing out is that the recipe used to create the sword is at least the same one that Minecraft players would actually use in-game to create one. It’s just one stick and two pieces of metal, so it’s expected that A Minecraft Movie would have to get this right lest it be obliterated online, but it’s still one point for accuracy for the movie. Momoa’s character tries crafting himself and creates something akin to a double bucket connected by chains which doesn’t exist in Minecraft right now, but who’s to say something like it won’t be added in the future?
After the clip, Olafsson explained how the creators of A Minecraft Movie arrived at this version of crafting in the film.
“When we were designing crafting and talking about what should it look like, we basically started at the crafting table itself,” Olafsson said. “We looked at the crafting table. We looked at the in-game texture, and it has this super pixelated picture of like a hammer and a saw there on the side, so obviously, that was built into the real-world crafting table. So it got this hammer, and we figured we honor the three-by-three grid perfectly, and thought it would be cool and kind of fun and gratifying to just give it a massive ‘whack’ and then have things appear.”
A Minecraft Movie is scheduled to arrive in theaters on April 4th, so expect to see much more of the live-action Minecraft film between now and then.
