When STOM won the pitch for LEGO's Diwali campaign with Singapore-based agency OLA, we knew we were stepping into a rather unconventional filmmaking process. One that we knew we were going to thoroughly enjoy.
The film revolved around the idea of bringing children's imaginations to life, with LEGO being the tool that allowed them to think beyond and do just that. The narrative was to unfold entirely through their own words, ideas and interactions. There would be no scripted dialogue, no predetermined responses and no traditional performances. Instead, the children would build, play and talk about their ideas for Diwali.
The agency OLA and STOM had arrived at a narrative structure and the three LEGO products to feature, with the full awareness that the actual conversations, reactions and interactions would be entirely unpredictable. The challenge was to create a cohesive, entertaining commercial from material that did not yet exist.
The Director, Sarah Thomas proposed a visual treatment elements from documentary filmmaking, reality television and situational comedy. The story would be captured through spontaneous conversations and constructed through the relationships between actions, reactions and carefully timed edits.
Casting for Imagination, Not Performance
Casting became one of the most extensive parts of pre-production.
Our casting team screened hundreds of children through multiple channels. The search extended beyond conventional casting agencies to theatre groups, street casting, young actors, influencers and children discovered through Instagram.
The film was initially conceived with children between the ages of seven and nine. However, having worked extensively with children, the Director was aware that children above seven often displayed a more mature approach to conversations.
"I wasn't looking for maturity in the children's answers. In fact, I was trying to avoid it. As children grow older, they begin picking up the language and behaviour of adults. Their answers become more measured, more conscious of what is expected of them. I wanted to preserve that wonderfully bizarre imagination that younger children have. It didn't matter if what they said made complete sense. Making sense of it was my responsibility, not theirs. I wanted them to be children, not little adults performing for a camera." — Sarah Thomas, Director
The casting process soon confirmed her instinct, prompting the team to progressively lower the age range, eventually settling on children between four and seven years old.
This decision introduced its own complications. Younger children might struggle to articulate complete sentences, sustain conversations or understand the direction of a question. Some might become completely silent in front of the camera, while others could wander away from the subject altogether.
For a commercial initially intended to run for thirty seconds, where every second of dialogue needed to contribute to the narrative, these were significant risks.
Despite these challenges, Thomas chose to work with the younger age group, drawing on her experience across documentary filmmaking, advertising and editing, with the understanding that the unpredictability of their responses would require a more flexible approach to both filming and constructing the narrative in post-production.
Preparing the Children Without Rehearsing Their Performances
Once the casting pool was narrowed down, the Director conducted a workshop with the shortlisted children ahead of the shoot.
The workshop served several purposes. It allowed the director to assess the children's personalities beyond their auditions, observe how they interacted with one another and determine which combinations might produce interesting conversations.
It was also an opportunity for the children to become familiar with the director, the other children and the kind of activities they would encounter during filming.
Importantly, the workshop was not intended to rehearse dialogue or train the children to deliver particular answers.
The objective was almost the opposite.
By encouraging them to play, speak freely and become comfortable around one another, the director hoped to reduce the self-consciousness that often accompanies being placed in front of a camera.
For the film to work, the children needed to forget that they were being recorded at all.
Constructing a Set That Didn't Feel Like a Set
The production design followed the same philosophy.
Rather than building a conventional commercial set where every movement was determined by camera positions and lighting requirements, we constructed a large, realistic environment that the children could inhabit naturally.
The scale was particularly important. The children needed room to move, play and explore without feeling restricted to carefully marked positions.
There was also the question of how to film them without drawing attention to the production itself.
Since the conversations were unscripted, we couldn't rely on conventional takes and retakes. A spontaneous response could not necessarily be recreated, and calling cut midway through an interaction could interrupt the children's train of thought.
To minimise these disruptions, the set was closed off to most of the crew. Only a small number of essential personnel were permitted inside, and the cameras were concealed beneath black fabric to make them less conspicuous.
The idea was to create an environment in which the children could engage with the activities and with one another without constantly being reminded of the cameras surrounding them.
Directing Three Cameras and Four Unpredictable Children
The shoot was designed around three cameras recording the children simultaneously, often for extended periods of up to forty minutes.
Thomas remained with the children throughout, initiating conversations, prompting them with questions and responding to their ideas as they developed. The questions were designed to explore the children's imaginations around Diwali while naturally incorporating the three LEGO products featured in the campaign.
At the same time, the director was communicating with the cinematographer and the A, B and C camera teams through talkback, coordinating coverage while remaining actively involved in the children's conversations.
This meant directing two very different things simultaneously: the children's attention within the set and the camera teams' attention towards the action unfolding around them.
There was no way to anticipate where an interesting moment might occur.
A child could be explaining an elaborate idea while another, seated beside them, reacted with a puzzled expression. Sometimes the reaction was more interesting than the conversation itself.
The DOP, Shaaz Rizvi and the camera team had to make instinctive decisions about where to direct their attention, often without waiting for explicit instructions. The process relied heavily on the cinematographer's ability to anticipate behaviour and the director's ability to keep conversations moving without making them feel orchestrated.
Finding Comedy in the Unexpected
Despite the precautions taken to conceal the cameras, the children eventually became aware of their presence. Occasionally, they would look directly into the lens.
In a conventional commercial, these moments would typically be discarded. But as we began reviewing the footage, we realised that some of these glances had an unexpectedly comedic quality. Instead of treating these moments as mistakes, we began incorporating them into the film's visual language.
The approach gradually developed into something resembling a SITCOM, where the humour emerged not only from what the children said but also from how the film responded to it.
The comedy was not scripted during production. It was discovered through the footage and developed through editorial decisions.
What initially appeared to be a limitation became an important part of the film's storytelling.
Nine Hours of Footage, No Script and Sixty Versions
Nine Hours of Footage, No Script and Sixty Versions
By the end of filming, we had nearly nine hours of footage across three cameras, filled with spontaneous conversations, unexpected reactions and countless narrative possibilities.
With no scripted dialogue or predetermined sequence of shots, editing became an exercise in constructing stories from the footage itself. A reaction from one conversation could complement a statement from another, while a simple change in the order of cuts could create an entirely different narrative.
Given the volume and complexity of the material, Director Sarah Thomas stepped into the editing process alongside the editor, drawing on her experience in editing and documentary filmmaking. What began as a single-editor workflow evolved into an exploration of multiple narratives, with Thomas developing different versions almost as individual screenplays, each with its own structure, conversations and comedic rhythm. Several of these versions became the foundation for the films presented to the agency and client.
"We weren't simply creating different edits of the same film. We were essentially writing new scripts using the footage. Every change in a reaction or conversation could lead to an entirely different story. With nine hours of unscripted material, I found myself constructing multiple narratives, each with its own beginning, progression and conclusion." — Sarah Thomas, Director
The shoot also faced an unexpected setback when a recording clip became corrupted during an on-set data transfer, resulting in the loss of approximately forty minutes of footage from the primary camera. Fortunately, much of the material was preserved through close-ups captured by the other two cameras, allowing us to work around the missing footage.
What began as a thirty-second commercial eventually expanded into a sixty-second film. Nearly sixty editorial versions were explored, with the final narrative emerging through extensive experimentation and close collaboration between the director, agency and client.
A Different Kind of Diwali Film
What came together was a one-of-a-kind Diwali film that celebrated the boundless imagination of children, preserving their innocence, spontaneity and wonderfully unpredictable personalities.
For all its challenges, this was a film we thoroughly enjoyed making. From the laughter on set to the countless discoveries in the edit, every stage brought something new to the table. It was an incredibly fulfilling creative experience, made even more special by the people we shared it with.
And perhaps that was the greatest joy of making this film. We set out to capture the magic of childhood, and somewhere along the way, we got to experience a little of it ourselves.
