Behind the bricks

In the fall of 2024, we started an ambitious project: a custom-crafted, baked-in-house, stop-motion Lego holiday video. It started out as a joke. Then grew into a full-fledged idea. Then a presentation, a script, a shot list, a bespoke soundtrack, 800+ bricks, 1,600+ photographs, and eventually an award-winning short film. In the spirit of Christmas in July, we’re taking a look back at how this crazy little greeting came to be, and what we learned along the way.

The first piece

Typically, every September, members of our creative team come together for a big group brainstorm. We know the holidays are coming, and we know the value of an annual end-of-year greeting to our friends and partners. It’s a great time to really flex our creative muscles and see how far we can push things. At some point the conversation almost always spirals into ranking our favorite holiday movies and specials. Perennially near the top: The Year Without a Santa Claus, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. Those Rankin and Bass claymation masterpieces that somehow seem to age like wine. What a great source of good-old-fashioned human inspiration, especially in a year saturated with too-slick AI-generated gimmickry. If we could somehow harness that lo-fi fun and nostalgic charm, we’d be able to pull off an unforgettable agency card. Only one problem: Our artists (gifted though they may be) haven’t worked in clay in decades. We started to seriously think if there was any way we could somehow merge the style of the classics with a less-demanding, more contemporary medium. Then it just clicked.

Figuring out minifigures

Our VP of creative, Brett Marek, discovered a website that would let you design custom Lego minifigures. And, thanks to his experience in caricature, he was able to design them incredibly lifelike. How funny, then, if we could make these mini versions of ourselves the stars of the show! Pharrell had just done it with his movie Piece by Piece. Surely, we could attempt something similar with real-life physical Legos? While Brett and the designers were working on character design, our writers teamed up to concoct a script. The challenge was to braid three separate messages together: a holiday greeting, a nod to our 20th anniversary as an agency, and some metaphor to make sense of the Legos. Incredibly, after multiple drafts and revisions, the end product was a blend of the entire team’s contributions, unattributable to any single member, but perfectly on-brand with the theme of the video itself. It would tell the story of where we came from and how, together, we're building even bigger things in the future. With enthusiastic buy-in from Quattro leadership, we got to work on purchasing the pieces, building the set, and taking over a slice of the office for our DIY animation studio. Shoot was about to get real.

Lights, camera, app-tion

We treated our after-work sessions as if we were on a Hollywood lot, complete with call times, screen tests, and craft services (mostly Wawa hoagies and those chalky candy Lego bricks). We agonized over the lighting, taping flashlights to lamp stands to get the right wintery color. We brought in rare bricks from our kids’ personal collections. And with the help of a specialized app, we were able to learn the art of stop-motion the hard way. Every camera movement, every zoom, every flash, would have to be smoothly stitched together from single frames. It might have looked like play, but it was a lot of mental work. We were conscious about which characters appeared in each scene, making sure the shots were balanced, never heavy with a specific style or department. The “actors” needed to be constantly in motion so they seem alive, so before every photo, we changed their pose just a little bit. We also really wanted the Lego characters to embody the spirit of the people they represented, so Scott Cohen’s minifig moves very charismatically. Dan Boerger’s is a bit more methodical. Vicky Waxman, a runner, is just a little faster at stacking bricks than the others.     It takes about 15 still images to create one second of animated footage. That means, for a minute-long video, we needed to capture at least 900 unique photos (plus more for shot establishment and credit footage). That’s a lot of little movements! And a lot of long nights. Naturally, there were some learn-as-you go mistakes, and more than a few flubs and flukes. But those are exactly the kind of elements that make stop-motion so warm and lovable. Like the pops and hisses on a vinyl album, the imperfections add to the excitement of the overall experience. They let you know, unmistakably, it was done by hand.

It all comes together

Once we had our photos, it was time to edit them together. Four of our team members contributed their voice-over talents to bring the action to life. And with the help of a keyboard, shaker egg, sleigh bell, guitalele, and kazoo, we wrote, performed, and recorded an original score as well. The whimsical closing credits theme was inspired by the Muppets, unsurprisingly. With the completion of the film, our team set out to design ways to promote it. We crafted a landing page and email, as well as a signoff banner and social posts to tease its release. Our team even crafted custom boxes for each individual minifig character—the party favor at our annual holiday bash. In the end, we were happy to hear our audience enjoyed watching it as much as we enjoyed creating it. And though it was our most labor-intensive holiday message to date, it seemed like a fitting way to cap the momentous occasion of our twentieth anniversary.   Since its release, the Brick by Brick holiday short film has earned several prestigious awards, including: Platinum Hermes Award for Team's Specific Project Achievement Platinum Viddy Award for Holiday Card Category Gold Telly Award for Art Direction Category Silver Telly Award for General Miscellaneous Video Thanks to everyone who helped bring this crazy moon-shot of a project to life. And an even bigger thank you to the ones who keep watching it! From the bottom of our hearts, from the whole quattro crew, have the happiest of summers, and a great autumn, too.