On Craft, Creativity, and Culture
I’ve been meaning to write this story for weeks. I usually build things in my head before I start using my hands and let me tell you, I have been struggling with this one. Today I finally landed on a title that felt right and I think I’ve got a good story to tell so here goes.
It’s a rare treat to get to combine your extracurricular hobbies with your day job and when I was given the opportunity to not only work with wood and LEGO, AND get paid by my employer to do it, I couldn’t hit the “Heck Yes” button fast enough.
A little back story here: I’m a dad in the suburbs so that means that LEGO and basement activity-caves play a big part in my life. Being that I couldn’t find any yeast or needlepoint supplies, I picked up woodworking during the pandemic and instantly fell in love with the idea of mastering a new skill while transforming my supple and delicate hands into calloused and bloodied wrist extensions. Plus there is a plethora of things to make and new and extremely dangerous tools to buy so this was a win-win for everyone involved.
Fast forward to the final days of winter. Spring was coming any day now and an opportunity came up at work where I was able to combine all of the things that I love into one big ‘ole side project for a client. Our team had wanted to create a mural for some time and with the warmer weather on the way, we decided on creating a cherry blossom mural in some form or another. (If you’re not a DC native, we know a thing or two about cherry blossoms here in town.) One thing led to another and the idea of creating a LEGO mural was bounced around and if you know me, I was all in as soon as the word LEGO was said out loud.
Things snowballed quickly and when all was said and done, we were on the hook for a project that became one of the bigger creative executions of my career (literally and figuratively). If you’ve ever seen a LEGO mural, you know you can’t do it right by keeping it small; it’s gotta be big to work. A sheet of plywood is 4x8 feet so sure, why not. That seemed like a good size. NABD. Next up was the actual design of the mural. This pretty much wrote itself and within a few hours, a rough design in Illustrator was created using the same rough dimension ratio as a 4x8.
A lot of math was involved and honestly, I took life drawing instead of math so this was the biggest source of angst I had during this project. There were a bazillion variables to consider and pairing this with my OCD-ness, my brain was pushed pretty hard. What baseplates to use, what size, how wide, what color, available 1x1 “dots” in stock, how to execute the design… so many choices, all of which had to be perfect with absolutely zero room for error.
The next step was to “pixelize” the illustration into 1x1 dots. Not only did the final result have to make sense when you looked at it (this is where size came into play), but we had to ensure that we could source all of the pieces at scale and in the available colors we needed. We landed on a design after tweaking for clarity at a 4' minimum distance and kept things sort of simple (not really) by limiting the mural to 23 colors. Total 1x1 dots needed? 41,472 pieces. That’s a lot of LEGO.
Here’s where things got interesting. As this project was becoming a reality, I recognized that there were going to be two parts of it happening concurrently. One part that was going to be entirely on me and the other part that would need the participation of an entire team. So while I was sequestered to my woodshop basement nook area, there were team members scouring the internet looking for huge quantities of LEGO. Tacking on to this massive task were little incidentals that carried their own weight of importance. We decided that the baseplates had to be white but LEGO had just released white baseplates and were out of stock online for months. We needed 40 of them. So, a few days after posting on Instagram for help, I had baseplates coming in from friends as far away as California and Maine. Our producer on the project had not only sourced 1x1 dots from several resellers, she was able to keep them coming in when we realized we were short by the thousands midway through the project.
Back in the woodshop, I wanted to keep things legit so I sourced cedar and white birch from Japan. I took it a step further and used an 18th century Japanese technique of wood preservation called sho shugi bon where one literally burns wood to a char to make it water and insect repellant. I had been wanting to try this technique for some time plus it gave me the excuse to buy a flippin’ flamethrower so of course this was going to happen. After the wood was charred, I mated the frame to the birch canvas and to make it easy to move around, I cut the entire thing in half and inserted three titanium rods to reinforce it when it was clamped back together.
Now, this is where it finally started to get really fun. We set the mural up at work, placed a few GoPros in strategic locations and made the call for help to start making this mural a reality. I was amazed at the amount of hand-raisers we received and it was off to the races after that. When I said everyone got involved, I literally mean everyone. Copywriters and art directors, producers and account reps, CDs, ECDs and SVPs all joined together, all in our spare time to build. Finance even leant a hand with their brilliant excel skills to help map out the mural into sections that were bite-sized and manageable. All that was left was to start pressing dots to baseplates. And press we did. Two weeks of working odd hours, sometimes coming into the office for the first time in three years, rolling over between meetings to knockout a few rows, inviting friends and family to lend a hand and bribing them with pizza, all of these moments that led to the bigger picture were moments you can’t plan for. They just happened. And they happened because we were working on a project that was fun and creative and just a departure from the monotony that we all had been living with over the past few years due to a global pandemic.
After the last 1x1 was firmly planted, we unveiled the mural during the annual kite festival on the DC mall during peak cherry blossom bloom. We had created a schedule for folks to swing by and keep an eye on the mural in shifts but in true amazing fashion, everyone on the team showed up at sunrise and hung out until the mural was finally broken down at the end of the day. No arm twisting, no guilt trips to stay, just pride in the work and a genuine admiration for friends who just so happened to be co-workers.
I suppose I’m now considered a veteran in my profession and with the years of experience, two of the things that are at the top of my list of reasons to stay at a gig are the people and the culture. They can’t exist without one another and are rarely found but this project taught me that they can exist, especially if you take the time to nurture them both. Yes, I was given the opportunity to combine several of my passions on a project; a rarity in one’s career. Yes, the end result was amazing and I wouldn’t change a single thing. These are all great things but my biggest takeaway are the memories that were created during the long nights and frantic mornings of the build. I was able to learn things about my direct reports that would probably be reserved for slap-happy 3am NB pitch conversations. I was able to have some of the realest conversations with my leader and mentor that we’ve had to date. I was able to witness team members do what they do best and create miracle after miracle out of thin air. And probably most importantly, I heard from people on the team state that this was something they would remember doing for the rest of their lives and that we were able to make and share these moments with each other at a time when we probably needed it to happen the most.
