The LEGO Movie, which was originally named LEGO: The Piece of Resistance and then later was changed to LEGO: The Motion Picture, is a movie released in theatres February 7th 2014 (USA and North America), February 8th (Netherlands), 14 February 2014 (Europe and Asia) and 3 April 2014 (Australia). It is rated PG, and is a cross between stop motion and computer generated animation. It came out on DVD and Blu-ray on June, 17th.

“An ordinary Lego construction worker, thought to be the prophesied 'Special', is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil tyrant from gluing the Lego universe into eternal stasis.”

- The Lego movie is a stop motion animation production distributed by Warner Bros- It was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

The Lego Movies marketing strategy has been very large and simple because Lego has a great online strategy and customer community, for example:- Warner Bros. began the marketing push seven months ago in June 2013 with a hugely

received teaser trailer and continued with a solid social marketing strategy. - There’s a Culture Show special on BBC2 right now about how LEGO has influenced

architecture.- A Lego group in Asia celebrated their 80th anniversary by building the worlds tallest Lego

tower (31.9 metres high). This gets a ton of publicity online which only increases the interest in Lego Movie.

- Lego has a crowdsourcing site, CUUSOO which the Lego movie have taken advantage of, putting advertisements in CUUSOO.

- ITV even turned over an entire advert break during its Sunday night edition of Dancing on Ice to LEGO, during which adverts from BT, Confused.com and Premier Inn were remade with LEGO models. v https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSbYBzUEQlc&feature=player_embedded

All of this shows that The Lego Movie doesn’t have to do very much in order to advertise the film, because the worlds public already like the Lego concept, a huge amount of advertising was done just through word of mouth and social networking.

Another huge factor of The Lego Movies marketing campaign is Twitter, giving lots of Lego fans an opportunity to get involved with the film:

The Lego Movie twitter account gives fans a chance to get acknowledged by the movie by using “The Lego Movie fan of the week” competition which gets people using and thinking about LEGO, shown by the Lego man suite and the LEGO cake pops below.

The Lego movie have also made a LEGO creation game where you get to create your own LEGO man and have it made, which can be found on their Twitter site and their website.

The Lego Movie has a vast amount of merchandise such as board games, play kits, clothing etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPnY2NjSjrg

The Lego Movie teaser trailerv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ_JOBCLF-I

The Lego Movie official main trailerv

There were many posters of The Lego movie of individual characters such as the poster shown below of batman and superman. The distribution team added in the # on these posters in order to get people talking about the characters on twitter, another good use of social networking. Various billboards, radio stations, press and TV interviewers added to the vast advertisement of The Lego Movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkkIFb1p8Xo

The Lego Movie: Chris Pratt "Emmet" On Set Movie Interview v

Films they have made:- Harry Potter- Inception- The Dark Knight- Green Lantern

Warner Bros have many production arms such as Warner Bros Television and Warner Bros Animation.

Warner Bros Television – This serves both Warner Bros and CW Television Network (in which time Warner Bros has a 50% ownership stake) although it also provides shows for other networks such as ‘Shameless’ for Showtime and ‘The Leftovers’ for HBO.

Warner Bros Animation – This is the animation division for Warner Bros. The studio is closely linked with the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies characters.

I think any institution in the top 6 would have liked to distribute The Lego Movie because of its huge appeal, but because of Warner Bros’ link with Looney Tunes in the animation section, they were the best option for The Lego Movie as Warner Bros would have distributed a large number of comedy animations previously. Also with Warner Bros experience of super hero movies such as The Dark Knight and Green Lantern, this would have made it easier for The Lego Movie to include these characters in their film.

The LEGO Movie, which was originally named LEGO: The Piece of Resistanceand then later was changed to LEGO: The Motion Picture

Working with Directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and Co-Director, Chris McKay (Robot Chicken) through pre-production to final DI stages, Animal Logic's team of over 350 artists, technicians and support staff spent 2+ years on the film.

Pre-production mainly consisted of things such as character design, writing and storyboarding, coming up with the animatics and casting. This would take a large amount of time, coming up with every single scene in a movie, their characters and animations, plus having to cast actors such as Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman.

Animal Logic created each individual component and virtually built every scene brick by brick, rather than cheating the images with seamless CG backgrounds and drawn bricks. It was important that everything on screen could theoretically be assembled by hand with actual bricks as it would add to the marketing appeal that there are endless possibilities of things you can do with LEGO, encouraging people to make their own stuff and share it.

A total of 15,080,330 bricks would be needed if one were to recreate the entire film with LEGO bricks by hand.

LEGO builds came in at several stages of the production process, from the art department, the Asset Department, the animators and The LEGO Group themselves.

2000 Lego bricks were handmade in order to add scratches and imperfections to them, adding to make the scenes more realistic.