We were invited to be hosts of LEGO's Play Unstoppable series; filming a show encouraging creativity in Character Design, and translating this into an in-person workshop aimed at children aged 6 - 12 at the LEGO Store in London's Leicester Square.
The workshop centres around creating a character and imagining a story around it, including creating your own book cover. To fulfill a childhood dream of seeing a LEGO rocket launch, we started with the idea of an outer-space themed story and created our LEGO rocket blasting off with astronaut, Maisy and her space-dog, Mickey.
Our idea was to bring childhood play into professional animation - thinking about how a young creator would imagine their LEGO pieces come life - in order to bring some extra magic to the show.
Although we had access to to every LEGO piece imaginable, we challenged ourselves to stick to using only the classic square and rectangular bricks to create volume in our builds. There's a certain nostalgia to building like this and a necessary graphicality in the shapes created.
This special show is now available to view on the LEGO site with an area to upload photos of results on the LEGO Life App. We just love seeing all the beautiful and unexpected creations that kids come up with.
With character creation, story ideas, and book cover complete, it was time to reimagine this virtual workshop in a real-life setting with 80 children let loose with all the LEGO pieces they could imagine!
For the in-person workshop, we took over the LEGO Store in London's Leicester Square and filled it with young creators ready to make their characters.
The first phase of the event was focussed on Character Design and building. It was wonderful to see the focus and clarity of ideas children of all ages had. The positivity towards their own and each others' work was inspiring.
In part two, we used the Storybook Teleporters to create book covers using the builds. Children positioned their characters in the photobooth, selected a background and name for their character and, again with a bit of magic, printed out their book cover.
As well as being a more efficient way for the adults to help make 80+ book covers, the Storybook Teleporters allowed the childrens' characters to become elevated and seen in a new light.
Seeing the pride when each child received their printed book cover was so special, and encouraged them to think of a story beyond and continue the creativity at home.
