Vidiyo Lego launch music video maker
LEGO has created a new DIY music video maker aimed at children between the ages of seven and 10. The LEGO Vidiyo music video creator will be available to purchase early next month from March 1, 2021
Vidiyo is Lego’s do-it-yourself music video maker, aimed at kids between the ages of seven and ten. It was created in collaboration with Universal Music Group, which has offered up around 60-second samples of big pop hits. Essentially, you buy minifigures which, when you scan them into the mobile app, unlock virtual characters to star in your music videos. These characters then dance and lip-sync along to the tracks in AR, projected into your living room. And when you’ve shot these clips, you can then share edited-down moments to a custom social feed.
When the line officially launches on March 1, the physical side of Lego Vidiyo will include six $20 BeatBoxes, which are literal small plastic boxes you can build to store and display your collection. The boxes come with a Lego minifigure representing a specific genre of music, a special “scanning stage” which a smartphone or tablet camera uses to bring these toys into the app, and 16 themed tiles Lego calls BeatBits that give access to special effects, dance moves, and filters.
Lego has already said that a new track will be added to the app every other week, with a better mix of genres coming. Expect K-pop, hip-hop and rock to get some more love and attention, as the catalog grows closer to 50 tracks by the end of 2021. Not that you’ll run out of content to chew through yet, since I’ve spent hours trying to get the band to dance perfectly to Celeste’s “Stop This Flame.”
There are two sides to the Vidiyo app:
a social media-like feed featuring short music videos other creators have filmed and shared, and the actual music video creation, which starts with choosing a song. Lego made a big deal about its partnership with the Universal Music Group for the Vidiyo experience, but at launch there will only be about 30 tracks to choose from, including more recent hits from Taylor Swift and The Weeknd and classic jams like MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.”
Vidiyo is like being in the control room during a live on-stage performance of a song. The scanned minifigures, including additional performers, appear in the real world setting a device’s camera sees using augmented reality, and while their movements and dance moves are synced to the music—which is part of the reason the current track selection is so limited—and additional dance moves, video filters, and special effects, like falling balloons, pyrotechnics, costume changes, can be triggered by pressing on the BeatBits tile on either side of the screen.
Lego is promising 130 will be available throughout the first year. You can choose which of the BeatBoxes to buy to match your musical preferences or style, and the Vidiyo line also includes 12 additional Bandmates minifigures that can only be collected through $5 blind bags.
