Advance has been making LEGO tv commercials for over 30 years and recently they rediscovered many classic commercials in their archives. They will be releasing them online over the next ten weeks, so look for them here, with a bit of commentary from the people involved in their creation.
I am a big fan of vintage LEGO ads and commercials, so I’m pretty excited about this project. Come take a trip down memory lane with Advance and The Brothers Brick!
Blast from the Past Trailer video:
Spyrius (1994):
Art director Christian Faber says:
“We shot this in London or LA, I can’t actually remember! It was one of the first motion control spots we did. At 0:15 We used a kind of ‘magic building’ technique where the bricks are held on the end of metal rods and then pulled apart. And if you look closely at 0:00 you can actually see the edge of the studio in the top
left corner.“The set filled a whole studio and we used a lot of analogue techniques — the planet is just painted cardboard and the backdrop is just a screen with
little holes in it and a big light behind it. The hands you can see moving the sets at 0:05 and 0:21 secs are actually wax hands. I had quite a lot of
explaining to do when customs asked why I had a bag full of fake arms!”
Technic Racers (1997):
Faber says:
“We shot it in a specially built 10-metre tunnel that was hand-painted and filled with smoke. While it may look straight, if you look closely at 00:15
you can see the yellow lines bending slightly — that’s because at this point we filmed the car in a carousel to make it look like it was speeding
forward! The animatronic hand was cast on a girl’s hand so it was a perfect fit and gave her the control she needed in the more complicated movements.”
Wild West (1996)
Faber says:
“We juxtaposed stills of the LEGO sets being ‘magic built’ with lots of scenes from classic American Westerns. The last few shots featuring the fight scene
were filmed and then graded to fit in with the rest of the background scenes. The magic building techniques shown here are actually illegal now –
the law today requires that toy sets that need to be constructed have to be shown being built by hand.
