Long time partners Wunderman Thompson / VML had a premonition of sorts. A practical fortune teller machine that prints lottery tickets themed around the Seattle Kraken. It was as if Zoltar from the movie Big granted hockey tickets as wishes. Our role: to help craft a social campaign that leverages the booming voice and LED light talents of the Great Zamboni machine across 4 distinct spots.

This was one of those projects you get to actually make with your hands, and we leaned on the incredible talents of Jason Puccinelli to fabricate this weathered looking Zoltar cabinet alongside VML’s own Casey Ligon to build the iconic Zamboni spinning in the center. But we didn’t want to stop there. We wanted to choreograph the light show within the cabinet with the actual recorded booming voice of the Zamboni. To do that, we wired up an Arduino board to 4 separate lighting tracks, controlled independently, and fed it a converted After Effects timeline of animation that we hand synced to the voice track. When we were on set, we hit play on the spot we wanted to capture, the machine came to life, and we shot all the coverage we could need in edit.

But… we didn’t stop there either. We then wrote a little more code to make the machine self contained so it could exist on the grounds of the stadium for a short stunt where fans could hit the button and be greeted by some words of Zamboni Wisdom and a mini light show.