It’s genuinely inspiring how Lego blocks, the nearly century-old Danish toys, not only survive, but thrive, within today’s youth culture. Maybe when your brand is all about breaking apart and rebuilding into something new, you excel at starting over and incorporating new trends. The new Lego Vidiyo line may use the bricks and minifigs we’ve loved for decades, but this augmented reality music experience feels primed and ready for 2021. These tech toys let children direct and share custom Lego music videos, with a catalog containing silly sound effects and licensed music. It’s such a cool idea that we only wish its potential for creative expression had fewer limits.
Cover Fee
You need at least two things before making music videos: a Lego Vidiyo toy, and an Android or iOS device with the free Vidiyo mobile app installed. The app lets you create your own custom digital character, but to start making videos you need to scan in at least one physical toy.
Toys come in two varieties. For $4.99, you can buy individual band member surprise packs that come with one musician and three BeatBits, the AR pieces that unlock new sights and sounds for your videos. For $20, you get a Beat Box that includes not just a band member, but a nifty brick pod that holds the character and more than a dozen BeatBits. They look like colorful album crates. The minifigs themselves sport stylish designs that reflect various musical genres, such as a punk rock pirate and an alien who is into EDM.
Lego obviously wants you to buy more toys, there’s no hiding that. At launch, there are more than 130, collectable BeatBits. That’s fine, that’s the business model. As with DropMix, Vidiyo breaks a promising artistic toolset into separate pieces, placing frustrating barriers between you and the complete, intended experience. Buying separate materials discourages experimentation.
Brick Disc Jockey
Once you build your band, it’s time to record music. Before you get to the performance, Lego Vidiyo offers many entertaining ways to express yourself. Choose random words to form hipster band names, such as “Primary Proposal” or “The Obvious Association.” Swap in wacky logo fonts and visual filters. Snap photos to use as your album art. As you play shows, you earn in-game currency to unlock cosmetics, such as bright, red hair or heart-shaped sunglasses.
To start a performance, point your phone camera toward an empty space. You can shoot the video at different scales, so up to three band members perform either as tiny toys on your table or towering giants taking up your whole living room. Pick your song, scan in one active band member, and begin the show.
As your band performs, you can move the camera like a director to get new angles or pause the action to snap a pic when figures strike particularly cool poses. The real way to guide your video, though, is by activating imported BeatBits. Like a DJ’s air horn hyping up a dance hall crowd, BeatBits drop in funky new flavor, from dope sounds to dance choreography to flashing lights to wardrobe changes.
Exploring the different BeatBits gave me a great appreciation for their improvisational potential. Timing certain sound effects to certain song sections gave me brief flashes of Fuser’s musical mash-up brilliance. But those were only flashes. Lego Vidiyo doesn’t give you very much much control over editing your music or your video. Simply choose which 5-, 10-, or 20-second chunk you want to upload when you’re finished.
Lego says it doesn’t want to overwhelm young users and make them think videos need to be perfect by giving them complex editing tools, and I get that. But children, especially Lego users, love to tinker with mysterious things and see how they work. Lego Vidiyo could’ve been for music production education what Lego Mindstorms kits are for robotics, or what old Lego filmmaking kits were for stop-motion animation. Currently, Lego Vidiyo is more like Lego Mario, a somewhat shallow interactive toy that’s just fun to remix.
Fortunately, there’s plenty here to remix. In partnership with Universal Music Group, Lego Vidiyo includes dozens of licensed songs from Katy Perry, Diana Ross, The Weeknd, and many other artists. New songs are uploaded weekly, alongside free daily mixes.
Good Vibes Only
Lego Vidiyo understands that social media has become extremely intertwined with music culture. Don’t worry, the app won’t funnel your children to Twitter. Instead, the Lego Vidiyo app serves as its own safe, self-contained social network.
Every uploaded video goes through a moderation process, so you don’t need to worry about private details getting revealed to the public. You can’t even download your video until after this screening process. To prevent online harassment, you don’t write descriptions or comments. You simply upload videos with pre-approved tags and react with emoji faces. You can’t even take screenshots in the app, lest you accidentally reveal some personal information.
Perhaps most impressively, the app doesn’t feel as sterile and sanitized as these precautions imply. Full of vibrant and modern youthful energy, it looks like a digital dance party with llama singers and unicorn DJs. Like the videos themselves, the social element carries the same silly, sunny atmosphere Lego excels at in everything from video games to feature films. I wish real social media fostered this much positivity.
Video Birthed the Lego Star
I love software that fosters music creation, particularly the apps and games that don’t require you to read notes or play an instrument. Lego Vidiyo achieves this with intuitive AR toys that kids can build into fist-pumping music videos. It’s novel and good.
However, with a few more robust editing options, even optional ones, Lego Vidiyo could open many impressionable eyes and ears to audio artistry’s deeper and more satisfying joys. If you’re interested in going that route, we recommend checking out Fuser, our Editors’ Choice pick for music creation games.
