Wonder Toy Store: Imagination Starts Here⁽⁰¹⁾

Childhood Play, Shot Like a Feature Film

Watching my nieces and nephews play reminded me how real an imaginary world could feel when I was a child. I wanted to capture that in an advert: something parents would recognise from their own childhood, and children would see as the kind of adventure they invent when they play.

The first idea followed two siblings playing knights and dragons at home. As I worked on it, I wanted to include other kinds of role play, so the film grew to include fighter pilots racing through a canyon, a Western showdown and a young knight confronting a dragon. Setting the reveal in a toy store gave all those adventures a shared location.

The children take everything seriously. They might be arguing over a gummy bear or a squashed toy castle, but to them it matters. That was where I wanted the humour to come from, with the camera treating each dispute as though it belonged in a feature film.

A Canyon at Full Speed

I explored the flights in Seedance 2.5 through CapCut Desktop, starting with text prompts to see how the scene might look. Top Gun informed the action, while a jet sheet showing the aircraft from several angles guided its shape and details. In the middle of the dogfight, the two pilots are arguing about who gets the top bunk.

A Very Serious Grievance

For the Western, I looked at the framing in Once Upon a Time in the West, particularly the distance between characters, the wide shots and the close-ups before anyone moves. I supplied a visual reference from the start because I had a specific composition in mind: three children facing one, with space between them. The patient framing gave the film a different rhythm after the jets, all over one stolen gummy bear.

Keeping the Children Recognisable

Once I had versions of the dragon-scene children I liked, I took stills and used ChatGPT Image v2 to make character reference sheets for Ollie and Emma. These helped keep them recognisable when the film moved from fantasy to the toy store.

Face to Face with a Dragon

The knight and dragon was the hardest scene to get right. It needed a sense of scale, with a small child facing something enormous, but Ollie and the dragon also had to face each other, and written prompts sometimes placed them differently. Giving the model a still with the positioning I wanted worked better than continuing to explain it in words.

I also simplified Ollie's attack to a direct charge and a slow-motion leap with his sword raised. That gave me a clear moment to build towards before the reveal.

Back in the Shop

The final wide shot brings the adventures together. We see the children playing in different parts of the shop, surrounded by the toys behind their imagined worlds, so the product is built into the story rather than added at the end.

I brought the scenes together in CapCut Desktop, choosing takes and shaping the pace around the reveal. The transitions are built around shared movement so the jumps between genres feel natural: missile smoke becomes Western dust, and a cowboy's coat becomes a dragon's wing.

I made the logo in ChatGPT Image v2. I originally considered a separate beige end card, then overlaid it on the final wide shot instead, because there was plenty to look at in the store and I wanted to give viewers a little longer with that image.

Seedance 2.5 generated the dialogue and sound effects within the scenes, Suno provided a simple, playful score that builds gradually, and Fish Audio voiced the closing line: “Wonder Toy Store. Imagination starts here.”

From CRE[AI]TE to CapCut World

Wonder Toy Store won the Commercial category at CapCut CRE[AI]TE 2026. On 24 October it screened on the main stage at CapCut World Los Angeles, where I joined Justin Hackney, co-founder of Wonder Studios, to talk about how it was made, before receiving the award at the ceremony that evening.