A+C is Bricking it for the Super Bowl

A+C Studios, an animation company specialising in stop-motion, has set itself a formidable challenge for the upcoming Super Bowl extrvaganza; to recreate the best of the game's halftime ads in LEGO... in less than 36 hours.

Called Brick Bowl the challenge is not an official LEGO campaign but the team at A+C thought it would be a good way to celebrate the increasingly popular influx of 'brick films'.

“There’s a limit to what we can plan until we see the ads of course, but we’ve got the logistics and contingency in place so that we can let loose with the bricks," says Dan Richards, director at A+C Studios. "Having all this Lego waiting to be built is killing the team here, it's like Christmas Eve!”

Where did the idea for this campaign come from?

The idea came over a discussion/argument on our first day back after Christmas over lunch between our creative team. The debate was over what are the most anticipated commercials of the year, as Christmas ads now seem to be as talked about as the Christmas shows themselves.

One of the team brought up that the Super Bowl commercials have the highest audience figures, with people watching the game just to see how creative their favourite brands can be. The team at A+C  then went from planning a 'Big Game' Party at the studio watching the game and adverts with pizza and beers, to toying with the idea of making a couple of Vines while at the studio, to eventually planning a full out military operation involved thousands of Lego bricks all with the crazy idea of doing it all in-house in just 36 hours!

How many people at A+C will be on the Lego building team?

One director; one animation director; one storyboard artist; one production manager; one producer; six stop-motion animators; six model makers; six production assistants; six digital animators; one editor; two sound designers; one voice over artist (in a sound studio in California). Plus a few others, 35 crew in total.

How will you decide which commercials to recreate?

It's going to be tough.... we're putting together a dossier of all of the brands which have bought ad space for the game. A few brands are putting out teasers, so we're listing brands which we're predicting will get the most attention.

We're not interested in recreating cars driving around in circles or women smiling, swishing glossy hair, we want to recreate the ads everyone's talking about the next day, like the VW Darth Vader kid advert [The Force] from a few years back. The other challenge is going to be how we stitch them all together and make them work.

What will be the biggest challenge in getting it all done?

We're having a training camp on Saturday and Sunday, introducing the crew and giving everyone a survival guide to building/animating Lego. Then the fun begins. The Game starts 11.30pm UK time and finishes at 3am.

The creative team will watch the game and ads then we'll start storyboarding our own take on the ads and the model team come in at 1am to construct sets. Once they're done the animators will get a phone call to come in between 4am and 1pm, followed by the digital team at 1pm.

The challenge is going to be locking the ads down and getting everyone started as it's a super tight schedule. The problem is the game ends at 3am, so we might not get to storyboard our last commercial until 4am leaving the model makers standing around and pushing the rest of the team back.

Come back to shots.net next week when the team have completed the spots to see how they got on.