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Matthew Ashton has not one but two extremely enviable jobs. As LEGO’s VP of design and executive producer on The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (and its predecessors) he is tasked with leading LEGO’s design managers day-to-day, overseeing the aesthetics of the movies and co-ordinating the tie-in toy lines.
"What we do to begin with is focus on making a great movie and getting the story right," he says, "because without a great story, we won’t be entertaining people and we also won’t be selling any toys, either.”
Once the overall story arc for The LEGO Movie 2 was in place and everyone had a rough idea of the character’s personalities, LEGO began a co-creation process with Warner Bros and Vancouver-based animation company Animal Logic. Concepts and artwork were dreamed up from both sides, and the new characters were refined in a series of video conferences.
As for the new sets, Ashton says that while the first LEGO movie was reflective of the toys that already existed, the idea was to take audiences to different realms with the new film. The initial collection was launched early in December with more sets planned by summer 2019.
Here, he breaks down how a few of the most exciting new characters and sets that were created.
Welcome to Apocalypseburg
“This is the first time that we’ve ever done anything that resembles an apocalyptic world. The Welcome to Apocalypseburg set (£280, 3,178 pieces) is just so impressive in itself. The Statue of Liberty is such an icon in so many disaster movies, that making that a central piece of the citadel is really important. So in the movie it’s this downtrodden environment, and in the set, there are so many special features and functions and little easter eggs in the models that we’ve built within that. It’s very heavy. I tried to take one off the shelf the other day and I was like ‘Oh, good lord.’”
General Mayhem and her Systar spaceship
“With her, we wanted to create somebody that was quite intimidating, quite mysterious to begin with. And we also wanted her Systar spaceship (£60, 500 pieces) to seem very futuristic and a complete contrast to what was going on in Apocalypseburg at the beginning of the movie. Everything is in disarray, it’s really gritty and there’s no hope left, we wanted to have this spacey white globe fly in with a really strange character that the rest of the gang haven’t encountered before.
“The official name for it is the Formidable. We’ve never done any spaceships that are focused around a female character before, and it’s really slick looking. We’ve even managed to incorporate a sticker roll in the back of the spaceship that reflects the jet stream that would come out of the back. It’s a substitute for Sweet Mayhem shooting stickers out of her gun, which we can’t do as a toy. It’s a bit of wow factor.”
The Rexcelsior
“It’s just one of those things - dinosaurs piloting a spaceship, who’s going to say no to that? It’s like two of the coolest things stuck together. We think there’s a lot of people who are really going to like that. The Rexcelsior spaceship (£140, 1,826 pieces) obviously is shaped like a giant fist. You can hold a trigger in the back of the fist and fly it around and then shoot lasers from it. Then you can open it up and play inside. And we’ve done a series of micro figures and micro dinosaurs because the scale of that ship is so epic in the movie, we’ve kept those proportions just to highlight how colossal it is.”
Queen Watevra’s Build Whatever Box
“She’s been very interesting to decide how we treat her. We went through a lot of iterations because before we decided she was going to be a real shapeshifter, she was actually a morph between a horse and a mermaid. She was going to be called Princess Merphony and then we were like ‘Oh, it’s a bit similar to UniKitty’ and we were designing her the wrong way round, with a fishy face on a horse’s body.
“There was a lot of discussion about how big the bricks are, whether the bricks should be stuck together in her regular form. There was a lot of back-and-forth just on the colour palette. We felt a mixture of colours would live up to Tiffany Haddish’s personality. Then of course we went wild and designed a load of different models that she could transform into. Some appear in the movie and we’ve also done extra ones for the toys (Queen Watevra’s Build Whatever box/ £35, 455 pieces) that aren’t featured in the movie.”
The Pop-Up Party Bus
“In the movie, there are these flying party buses that the characters get inside. With that product (Pop-Up Party Bus/£80, 1,013 pieces), I’m so proud of the transformation we’ve managed to get in there. It’s this bus on the outside and then it all folds out into a massive dance floor. There’s a disco light in there as well that can rotate round. It all lights up, it’s a very fabulous set.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK