There’s a lot of sameness in Christmas advertising. Lego Australia’s Christmas ad by Sixty40 & CHE Proximity stands out.
Yes, it’s easier to stand out when yours is the only ad made with Lego, but the ad also has a lovely a story…and reindeer poop.

And while it’s sending a Chrissy message about friendship and co-operation, it also reminds you – rather fondly – of the weird gizmos you made with Lego when you were a kid. Christmas ads are about selling products, after all.

The brief was for a 30 second spot for TV. The extended version (below) is a glorious demonstration of both its creators’ enthusiasm for the project and their collective imagination.

Sixty40 and CHE also produced three stand-alone 15 second spots for Duplo, LEGO City and LEGO Friends, which meant the partners had to create almost three minutes of stop-motion content over 9 very long shoot days, with 3 separate animation tables running concurrently.

“We called on master animator, Norman Yeend, to help us breathe life into our little plastic stars, and – considering their action ability is limited to moving their arms and legs straight up and down – the subtlety of character and emotion he was able to draw from the figures was incredible,” Sixty40 noted.

“Special mention must also go to Nigel Hill and Tess Simpson, who built the majority of the sets from approximately 12,000 individual Lego pieces, and waited patiently in the wings to fix all of the things that Kyra broke in her over-enthusiastic animation style.”

There was also the task of figuring out how to make LEGO lights that don’t light up…light up…

…and doing justice to the team members’ childhood imaginations, in order to ignite the imaginations of the campaign’s audiences.

“To quote our tireless compositor Young (while cheerfully cleaning up the millionth piece of blu-tac left in the scene), “this is just like a normal job, except better because it’s Lego,” Sixty40 commented.