Dreamzzz, how a Lego dream is born

Billund – Marcia, Martin and Tommy are no longer in the skin. They have been working on a new Lego project for more than a year and a half. All this time they called him Titan. A code name. As secret agents they have protected their work from prying eyes and ears, but now the time has come to present it. All three welcome reporters into a room of the Lego Campus located in Billundin Denmark, where the Danish company was born in 1932 by the hand of the craftsman Ole Kirk Christiansen.

Marcia Marks Laursen (Head of product), Tommy Andreasen (Concept developer) and Martin Klingerberg (Design manager) have contributed, in every sense, to the realization of a dream. It’s actually called Dreamzz – here it is, the real name of the project – the new Lego animated series to be released on May 15th. A few months later, in August, the sets inspired by the adventures of the new characters will also arrive: Mateo, Izzie, Cooper, Logan and Zoey. They are all school mates who live their own lives adventures between reality and fantasy. And who are committed to defeating the enemies that populate their nightmares.

The life of the little ones is not always happy and carefree. Lego discovered it thanks to a global research involving 23,000 children between 6 and 12 years of age from 29 different countries (including Italy). Seven out of ten, i.e. 69% of respondents, “deal with complex emotions such as stress and loneliness on a daily basis”. One of the most cited sources of stress is social media. The study, conducted by Opinium Research, showed that for 68% of children, happy dreams have a positive impact on their day and their creativity.

In short, to create the new Dreamzzz series, Lego started from a survey made up of numbers and percentages. From the data that paint a scenario. It is not a completely new process: even the launch of the new characters of Lego Friendswhich happened just two months ago, was supported by global research that pointed out the complexity of the feelings that characterize a friendship.

Thinking about it, Lego has been working on emotions since at least 1989, when for the first time his minifigures left the factory with varied facial expressions – and body parts -. Before the Lego Pirates, in fact, the characters of the Billund company always had the same smile “printed” on their faces.

Almost a quarter of a century has passed, and Lego increasingly feels the need to adapt its bricks to the multiple personalities of those who use them. Without gender distinctions. It’s the first thing he points out Marcia Marks Laursenin the interview we had with her after the presentation of Dreamzzz.

“The real challenge – he told us – was to create a product that was inclusive right from the start and that was equally interesting for boys and girls, who, as we know, sometimes love different things. And so we tested all of our ideas with this in mind, and changed and updated each version of our work until a result was achieved that satisfied both genres.”

Marks Laursen oversaw all stages of Dreamzzz development. When you were entrusted with the reins of this project, so ambitious in wanting to recreate a world – that of dreams – which by its very nature is extremely elusive, her wrists didn’t tremble. “I was not afraid – she told us – I was quite honored. And proud that the company gave me responsibility for a job that was conceptually starting from scratch. Responsibility takes courage. Yes, you have to be brave.”

In fact, as we have also written in the past, creating a Lego set when certain references exist – this is the case of sets inspired for example by Star Wars oa Harry Potter – it is certainly a demanding mission but, in some way, facilitated. Lego designers need only be inspired by an existing world and to well-known personalities.

But in the case of Dreamzzz the road was not marked at all. Indeed, any route could have crossed a potentially boundless territory. Dreams have neither limits nor contours. And they can be tremendously chaotic. So how did Lego manage to make the pieces of such a complex matter fit together?

“I’m honest – he told us Tommy Andreasen, who worked on the concept and the TV entertainment side of Dreamzzz – when you work so long on a project it can happen that you have doubts about what you are doing. And then there’s another problem: Dreams are abstract. And so we had to make sure we were producing something that children could understand.”

“Fortunately we were able to show what we were doing to thousands of children,” Andreasen explained. And the response of those who would have watched the new series – and played with the sets – it was fundamental to fix the shot. “I think these children can be defined as co-creators [di Dreamzzz, ndr] – said Marks Laursen – but that doesn’t mean we took their dreams literally and put them on the show. Let’s say that children inspired us. We showed them the sketches, the drawings, part of the content and we worked on our ideas until it was clear to us that they understood them, that they believed in them and above all that they worked”.

“One of the rules we gave ourselves was to follow the same principle of dreams with designso it often happens in our sleep to mix the objects we have seen and the experiences we have had during the day – he told us Martin Klingerberg, who led the designers responsible for the Lego sets inspired by the new series – Sometimes it happened that what we produced didn’t make much sense. Or that prototypes you have become attached to never reach production. Leaving certain ideas behind was definitely the hardest part of this project.”

When building a world from scratch, the Lego team that develops the concept and works on the animated series is constantly confronted with the designers who take care of the sets. Everyone enjoys total independence, but it is evident that designers deeply influence the creative process. It would be illogical to populate the story with elements that then, for various reasons, cannot be put together with bricks.

In Billund we previewed Dreamzzz sets: they are, indeed, wonderfully strange. At first glance some pieces may appear confusing, but then you realize that every detail has been studied. As in the case of a very colorful one tree houseone of the largest sets in the series, where a reasoned disorder reigns: the contours are not defined and this it goes perfectly with their dreamlike nature.

What makes Dreamzzz different, compared to all the other Lego sets we’ve seen in the past, is that for the first time the instruction booklet presents a “crossroads”like the Game books from the 80s in which the reader could choose a alternate ending.

In the case of Dreamzzz, kids can choose what the character will look like, the robot or the vehicle they are building. The combinations – a maximum of two for each set – are highlighted directly on the boxes of the products. We recently observed a similar mechanism in the Lego Icons set dedicated to the DeLorean from Back to the Future, which can be built in three different ways.

Behind the minifigures, and the small colored plastic pieces of Lego, in the end there are always people. Managers, creatives and designers who respond to market strategies, of course, but who at the same time are confronted on a daily basis with the more childish side of their personality. As beautifully told in the film Bigwith Tom Hanks, to create products for children you need, in a sense, their eyes. You have to know how to dream.

Tommy Andreasen, at 25, was a freelance illustrator and he earned his living as a gardener. But she’s dreamed of working at Lego since she was 12, and she finally made it.

Martin Klingerberg, at the age of 10, while playing with bricks often said to his best friend: “What if one day we become Lego designers? Wouldn’t that be beautiful?” He too managed to make his dream come true.

Marcia Marks Laursen never imagined working in Billund. “I come from a small Caribbean island of 150,000 people – she says – and I didn’t think I would get this job. We have to believe it. And to the girls who want to take this path I say: ‘Try it. Don’t think about it, do it!’”.