Gorilla helps John Lewis animate teddies in store for Christmas children

Specialist event production company, Gorilla Marketing & Events created a state of the art, 360 degree, teddy bear scanner for John Lewis’ flagship store on Oxford Street at the end of last year. The teddy bear scanner was built by Gorilla to support John Lewis’ national Christmas TV advertising campaign featuring Monty, the cuddly, lonely, penguin. Titled “Monty’s Magical Toy Machine”, the scanner allowed children to bring their teddies in store, and see them brought to life in a very special way.

The scanner was in place until Christmas Eve, and did a brisk trade taking customer’s teddies (and other cuddlies) and imaging them at 20 degree intervals using three high definition cameras to create a unique teddy animation for every consumer. The scanning booth concept was developed by Tech Department, Microsoft and John Lewis Partnership and was made a reality by Gorilla.

Once the teddies were scanned, the magic began, as Arthur Tindsley of Microsoft’s Creative Ad Solutions team explained, “Children entrusted their toy to the scanner and soon saw an image of their toy on the big screen. As the child waved or pointed at the screen, Kinect technology triggered the toy’s awakening and they started to dance, as did the children in most cases! Once both child and toy had danced their hearts out, they had an opportunity to take a selfie together to capture the moment for posterity. We hope this live interaction brought a bit of Christmas magic to children – and brought out the inner child in adults, too. The thing we’re really keen on when bringing to life a creative idea is making sure we don’t use technology for technology’s sake. We’re trying to make the tech disappear. So a child completely forgets that it’s technology, and it’s just magic for the user.”

Jamie Eames, director of Gorilla explained how they put the teddy scanner together, “With a short turnaround time we elected to make as much use of standard construction materials, prefabricated parts and stock mechanisms as we could. As a result, once our engineers had finalised the design, we were able to construct and finish the scanner without recourse to special tooling or expensive custom components, and delivered the project on time and on budget.”