In early 2022, LEGO rolled out their “small toy, big joy” campaign to showcase smaller sets at a more affordable price point. The team at Momentum Worldwide was asked to showcase that small toys can provide as much joy as the larger, more expensive sets. Enter the LEGO Big Joy Generator. An interactive, puppeteer operated vending machine that brought the new characters that LEGO featured in their “small toy, big joy” campaign to life.

The Momentum team sourced We Are Royale out of Los Angeles to build the two animated characters that would be featured on the vending machine. Leveraging Animaze software, the characters could be controlled with face tracking technology via a webcam and preform pre populated movements based on keyboard commands.

My responsibilities included managing the relationship between our vendor and the internal team, tracking timelines and deadlines, finding solutions and compromises as we received edits and feedback from the clients, joining the team for site visits to discuss feasibilities and needs, and assisting our in house creative technologist during load in and throughout the content shoot days.

After months of refining the characters, the result was two identical copies of their real world counterparts - all the way down to the LEGO logo on the studs of the bricks. From start to finish, the build timeline was roughly three months.

After numerous site visits the location was set for the playground at Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School in Atlanta, GA. The shoot would be outdoors, requiring the back of house space for the puppeteer to be located in a box truck about 50 yards from the machine itself. Our puppeteer, Raymond Carr (a graduate of the Jim Henson school of puppetry) was positioned in a box truck outfitted with a computer, webcam, headset with a microphone so he could hear and see the kids interactions. Cabling connected the vending machine to the technology within the box truck to transmit the animation directly to the machine.

Once the puppeteer was trained and in place, children were prompted to interact with the machine, each receiving their own takeaway resembling the exact character they interacted with on the screens.

The content was then edited and rolled out for use across social platforms, where it became one of LEGO’s most successful campaigns in the brand’s history.