Meet the Creatives Behind New Girl Group L2M
Mads Munk & Christian Dyhr talk about the concept for an exciting new music project and its link with LEGO.
It’s been 20 years since the Spice Girls took the world by storm with debut single, Wannabe, and in that time the five members have not only become the most famous pop stars of a generation, but their tone and talent has inspired a spate of acts in similar vein to champion the girl power spirit.
The latest is L2M, an all-female pop group consisting five 11-12-year-olds who were officially unveiled at an event in New York last week. Hand-picked by former Syco Entertainment scout, Tim Byrne, from across the US and Canada, the act is the result of a vision from M2Film founder, Mads Munk, and was thought up during production of a LEGO movie.
Not only do the girls of L2M sing, dance and say all the right things – as the video for their catchy debut single, Girlz (below), highlights – but they are also heavily involved in the creative aspect, pitching in on everything from the language used in their branding to what clothes they wear on set. Being so young, naturally they are also digital natives with a healthy appetite for social media which is invaluable in connecting with and learning from their audience.
“When Mads came to me about a year ago and told me about the project I feared that he wanted me to work on something from a template; a colourful, Disney-like theme and that would have felt dead wrong for me,” says Christian Dyhr, the HELE VEJEN designer behind L2M’s branding and overall theme.
“Thankfully, that’s not what they wanted me to do. They wanted to empower the girls and realised that to try and build a world that didn’t shine through naturally would have been wrong.”
Dyhr refers to an “L2M universe” when he describes his work and the emoji, modern slang-inspired concept he has built for the group. He's overseen the design and animated experience on the girls’ website, considering that the majority of their young fans will be connecting on mobiles, as well as their Girlz logo and many other assets. The theme can also be seen in the debut music video.
Being in constant conversation with the artists, naturally, the concept continues to evolve: “They live more on a secondary digital planet than we do," Dyhr adds. "It’s fast. Everything has to be rapid and ready within 24 hours because they’re everywhere on social media so we talk to them a lot. We first got them to write down some ideas about what they thought L2M was in their own words. I could never have come up with that on my own. I take what they say and design it in our little world, then present back to them and it’s about making the distance between the fans and L2M as short as it can possibly be.”
According to Dyhr, the key to the concept is soaking up what the band has to say about what’s happening in their world. “It has to be authentic and raw” he says, “they’d be able to detect it if you were trying to tell them what’s cool. It’s the other way around with us learning from them.”
The transparency of the L2M project is testament to how the group was formed. Munk was in charge of making a LEGO movie for the toy company's LEGO Friends sub-brand. The film, called Girls 4 Life, needed a soundtrack and the Danish creative producer wasn't happy with the quality of what was on offer so took matters into his own hands to improve the material.
Realising he’d become a pain for the production team by pestering with endless questions about the ages of the voices being used, around a year and a half ago he was sitting in LA and came up with the idea of creating a whole new band to do the songs.
“I discovered that the industry generally uses the voices of people in their late 20s-30s and I didn’t want to use the same tactics,” he says. “I wanted to bring it down to the same level as the young characters in the film and started casting for voices.”
A still from LEGO Friends movie, Girls 4 Life, which inspired the idea for L2M.
“I thought, why don’t we make our own songs sung by our own band? Because it was so complicated to go out to the industry and get them to do it for us, I wanted control over the ages of the talent and knew the target group,” he adds.
Having released their catchy debut single, Girlz, in January, and with the LEGO film now out, the L2M project has finally come to fruition and was officially unveiled on Thursday night in New York as the band gave their first live public performance - a proud moment for Munk.
How far they can go now with the project is anyone's guess but L2M is a prime example of what can be achieved through creativity and thinking, perhaps not big, but genuinely for the sake of an honest product and pushing it as far as it can go across multiple platforms.
The event in New York took place in the same week that Nike launched its Margot vs Lily branded web series for women and the girl power theme seems to be picking up a new kind of momentum - this time channelled through the power of modern, mobile technology.
