Hollywood Monster has continued to increase its work in London throughout 2016, after setting its sights on the capital at the end of last year. Last month, Hollywood Monster helped Lego unveil its brand-new flagship store in Leicester Square and erected a digital advertising installation in the centre of Piccadilly Circus, bringing signage with monster impact to the capital. The projects add to Hollywood Monster’s ever-growing portfolio of work in London, including jobs for the 2012 Olympics, Westfield shopping centre and Fortnum and Mason.
Hollywood Monster helped build suspense brick by brick ahead of Lego’s Leicester Square flagship store’s unveiling on 17 November. The new site is the toy company’s biggest store in the world and required 260 square metres of vinyl to stay hidden. Disguised as a Lego toy tub, the building’s huge hoarding featured a Union-Jack-clad Lego figure who invited passers-by to watch the ‘store unboxing’. Continuing the theme of making the store a giant toy box, in the place of the usual product description customers were informed that the shop would be suitable for ages 0-99+ and had over 30 million pieces inside.
The project was brought to life by welding together four graphics and installing them on to a prefabricated 44mx9m truss. The frame was assembled overnight on 14 November by a team of 12 fitters, taking 20 man hours in total. The result was a free-standing structure with banners that could be detached and dropped in time for the big reveal.
Simon McKenzie, Managing Director at Hollywood Monster, worked on the job alongside Project Manager, Alice Lutwyche. Speaking about the success of the work, McKenzie said:
“We were delighted to be asked to undertake this project, as building a freestanding structure of this scale in such a high profile location is a very rare opportunity! This was our first experience working with Lego, and it was a real team effort: every step from the initial design work to the moment the banner dropped took meticulous planning to execute perfectly. I could not be more pleased with how it turned out and I hope this is the first of many collaborations between us.”
The Lego collaboration completed a week before another high-profile Hollywood Monster project. The printing and signage experts worked with Wildstone, an outdoor advertising consultancy firm, to create signage for a digital display job with a difference. Positioning a 3-metre-tall octagon in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, the installation has digital features on each side that will display adverts from brands such as Samsung during the festive season. Hollywood Monster dispatched two crews to assemble the piece, a feat that took 4 days to complete. It will remain in place until mid-January.
“This is the third consecutive year that we have worked with Wildstone to put together the Piccadilly Circus installation, and every year we try and make it bigger and better. I think we have once again achieved this and we hope that the people who pass by enjoy the spectacle of it again. We’re already thinking about what we’ll make next year, so watch this space!” McKenzie added.
