Legoland Woodland
THE BRIEF
In 2024 Legoland Windsor and Legoland Germany unveiled Woodland Lodge and Adventure Lodge - brand new resort areas for guests to spend the night surrounded by nature.
Our brief was divided into 2 experiences:
1 - Create an AR experience that would entertain families staying at the lodges, while staying true to the nature-theme.
2 - Create a video sequence to play on a giant screen present in the entertainment area of Windsor's Woodland Lodge, acting as a window into a LEGO Woodland scene with engaging animated content.
THE AR EXPERIENCE
For this part of the brief, we considered that families would likely be seeing the experience's call-to-action at a time when they are confined to a room, likely after a busy day of exploring the park.
We didn't want this to be an excuse to give children some mind-numbing screen time, so we thought of a storyline and mechanic that could entertain while educating, and involve the whole family for a few minutes.
The resulting experience saw LEGO Rangers prompting players to explore LEGO fauna and flora appearing in their rooms, and take photos of what they found along the way without disturbing the animals.
We wanted the experience to really play on the rooms' physical spaces, so we used LIDAR to create digital replicas of each room, ensuring flowers sprouting on the walls would feel like they were really attached, animals scurrying around the room could hop on the bed, hide under desks, and jump onto wardrobes or window sills.
Families then had to move around the room to take pictures of each plant or animal type, to unlock a final reward, and the ability to create their very own virtual LEGO Woodland scene by dropping chosen items across the room surfaces.
We developed the experience with ZapWorks Studio, leveraging Zappar's Extended Tracking to use artwork in the rooms' wallpapers as an invisible starting point for the experience's placement.
THE CINEMATIC CONTENT
Our idea was to create a LEGO-built scene inspired by the Woodland theme, with LEGO trees, bushes, plants, logs, stones, you name it.
LEGO figures and animals would then animate at different times, playing scenes randomly to make for an unexpected sequenced.
Knowing that this screen was going to be 4 metres long by 3 metres tall, and be seen across the whole entertainment area within the Woodland Lodge, we thought there was an opportunity here to go just beyond video content, and actually render everything in real-time for a really dynamic result.
Using Unreal Engine, we created the real-time environment in a close collaboration with LEGO.
We wanted the scene to feel alive, with wind blowing through foliage, and by matching the time of day outside, with the sun starting high up in the sky in the morning, going very low for sunset and giving way to a beatiful moonlit sky at night.
As the seasons change throughout the year, the real & LEGO foliage changes colour to match it, with the temperature of the lighting in the scene changing accordingly.
With the scenery established, we got to working on the animations we'd storyboarded - some primary ones, with longer sequences featuring more detailed character animations, and simpler secondary ones that could be played alongside a main animation, or in-between them to make sure this virtual window always looked alive.
From birds flying in the sky, to frogs jumping around, fish jumping from the water, squirrels foraging for acorns, otters swimming, rabbits grazing and LEGO Rangers exploring, there was something for everyone, with plenty of humour to entertain young ones.
Running the Unreal experience in real-time meant we could also dynamically react to topical events, by showing messages with times for the next shows, or even ensuring no LEGO Ranger characters appear on-screen when a show is happening, to keep children from doubting why there are screen and real versions of the same character present at the same time.
