The advertising minds at Zero Degrees West approached us about a hardware project to advertise the release of the Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD of the Night at the Museum 3. Just as in the film, they wanted to bring the lions in Trafalgar Square to life, or seemingly so to the unsuspecting tourists posing for pictures.

How It Worked

Zero Degrees West wanted a mechanic to, ostensibly, make the Trafalgar Square lions roar. We had to create something which would make a loud enough sound to scare passersby and to make it seem as though it were actually the lion roaring. The solution was to wire a small box to be hidden by the lions and to create a remote trigger for the team to allow precision timing for maximum surprise.

In order to conceal the logistics behind making the lions roar, we had to condense the mechanics into a small black box: 27x17x12cm. The receiver contained 24 volts worth of batteries, a 20 watt amplifier, some microcontroller elements and a couple of decent car-door speakers. The trigger used 433MHZ radio to communicate with a tested range of over fifty metres.

Members of the WMAS team, alongside a Zero Degrees West film crew, assembled the equipment and waited for unsuspecting tourists to pose for a photo by the lion. With the trigger, we were able to time the roar perfectly so the film crew could capture some awesome reactions.

The Result