36 replies to this topic

[Toajaller1]

Ive been thinking about this a lot lately. If someone were to make a Bionicle live action movie, how would you want it done? I think it would be dark. Something that would appeal older audiences. I would make a movie for every chapter of the story. Would be something like 11.
What are your thoughts?

[Constructman: Black Knight]

I don't think this belongs in S&T.

I don't know how it would get pulled off. It would require massive amounts of cgi

[fishers64]

I don't think a Bionicle live action movie would be feasible. Humans do not look like robots, and any good attempt to make them so would be expensive and unnecessary, when CGI works just fine IMO.

[bonesiii]

Moving to Media Discussion.

It's been brought up before, and the answer is the same every time. Pure live action cannot be quality with Bionicle because they're not humans. It would end up being Power Rangers -esque; guys in cheesy suits.

Live action motion capture for CGI would be another story though, with the possibility of working. Live filming for settings could be good too if done right.

[Meiko]

Oh god this sounds more like Power Rangers than when people talk about Ninjago. I think all LEGO movies should stay with animation. LEGO just isn't ever a human form. It sounds creepy IMO...

[Alyska]

It depends on whether motion capture counts as live action. So, while the characters would be computer generated in terms of appearance, their movements and expressions would all come from live actors. If it was done by, say, the Lord of the Rings team, it could be amazing (Especially since the Island of Mata Nui is at least partly based on New Zealand).

[Lyichir]

I think even stop-motion/claymation could be better than live-action. The only way I feel live-action could work is if every character were done in motion capture, and at that point it would be more economical to just go with straight CGI.

[CeeCee]

I always think Bionilces suit CGI.

[toa kopaka4372]

It would be extremely expensive to look good, there'd have to be a lot of CGI. It could possibly be done in a way similar James Cameron's Avatar.

Live actors with no added effects is a definite no, though.

[WhenToasFall]

Animation will always be the best! The style of the previous 4 movies was perfect for resurrecting the Bionicle Universe.
Love how the action and the movement of the characters is worked out, and that will be completely impossible for humans.
What actually will be a good Idea is to make a Manga soap of the Bionicle legend. This would be really like AWESOME




Conclusion: Nice Idea, but would be impossible to make it run great... :/


Grtz WhenToasFall

[Draezeth]

Well, Avatar used motion capture + CG, as did many other movies in the past. Don't see why that wouldn't work in this case (other than cost, of course).

[Constructman: Black Knight]

In Avatar there were humans. In Bionicle, no. So if you need CGI for every single live actor, it starts to get redundant. Why not just make it full on CGI?

[ZHX]

BIONICLE is incapable of being live-action due to the lack of humans in the series.

 

CGI is pretty much the way to go.

[Applejack]

How would I want it done?

I wouldn't.

[Alyska]

In Avatar there were humans. In Bionicle, no. So if you need CGI for every single live actor, it starts to get redundant. Why not just make it full on CGI?

 

 

Well, you might want to have scenery from real-world locations, as opposed to rendering everything on a computer. As I mentioned above, New Zealand would be a fantastic place to film the parts of the story that take place on Mata or Voya Nui. Given that most of the main characters have humanlike proportions, you could possibly film the live actors in that location, and simply superimpose the CGI over the top, instead of green-screening everything.

 

Also, if you check out some of the set photos from the Iron Man films, you can see that in some scenes, Robert Downey Junior wears a full set of armour- in others, he wears only the helmet and chest armour,  (his arm and leg armour is inserted later via mocap/augmented reality). In other scenes, the entire suit is done with CGI and motion capture. The same thing could be done with Bionicle characters, except that there would need to be motion capture on the actors' facial expressions as well as their broader body movements.

 

So, I'm not sure how practical it is from a filmmaking perspective, but the use of "live" motion capture is certainly not implausible. However, I imagine that once the setting shifted to Metru Nui, you would be looking at full CGI. 

[Aanchir: Rachira of Time]

In Avatar there were humans. In Bionicle, no. So if you need CGI for every single live actor, it starts to get redundant. Why not just make it full on CGI?

Keep in mind that there are movies that use full CGI for every actor, even if they use motion capture and have all human characters. A stunning example is last year's movie The Adventures of Tintin, which was a work of art, morphing every actor into a somewhat cartoony likeness of Herge's iconic characters. But of course, that requires a tremendous budget, not to mention greatly complicating action scenes. And for characters like those in BIONICLE who have a lot of pistons and other mechanical details which don't necessarily have a 1:1 relationship with parts of the human anatomy, adding another step to the animation process would be pretty pointless.

[TheSkeletonMan939]

Bionicle + live action = plain ol' weird.

 

I wouldn't mind having people acting as models for CGI development, to give the animators an idea of how things move fluidly.

[Samhain]

That takes a lot of effort for the lack or money such a project has going for it. You would have to cross that financial hurtle first, however even without it, you would have to consider it would probably go strait to DVD, considering that I don't think the target audience of Bioncle fans is large enough to warrant a full release, and that is assuming that the movie would be accessible to non-Bionicle fans and draw them in.

[Alyska]

That takes a lot of effort for the lack or money such a project has going for it. You would have to cross that financial hurtle first, however even without it, you would have to consider it would probably go strait to DVD, considering that I don't think the target audience of Bioncle fans is large enough to warrant a full release, and that is assuming that the movie would be accessible to non-Bionicle fans and draw them in.

Hero Factory is getting a feature film, to be released in cinemas, possibly live-action. If Bionicle had stuck around just a few more years, they would have almost certainly done a movie for it given the current trend. Bionicle actually has a one-up over HF in that it holds inherent appeal to the same 7-12 year old male demographic as HF, as well as having nostalgia value for a large number of twentysomething year olds. 

 

But I actually think it's better that Bionicle ended before that happened, since it opens up the possibility of Bionicle being rebooted later with a feature film series.

[Lyichir]

 

That takes a lot of effort for the lack or money such a project has going for it. You would have to cross that financial hurtle first, however even without it, you would have to consider it would probably go strait to DVD, considering that I don't think the target audience of Bioncle fans is large enough to warrant a full release, and that is assuming that the movie would be accessible to non-Bionicle fans and draw them in.

Hero Factory is getting a feature film, to be released in cinemas, possibly live-action. If Bionicle had stuck around just a few more years, they would have almost certainly done a movie for it given the current trend. Bionicle actually has a one-up over HF in that it holds inherent appeal to the same 7-12 year old male demographic as HF, as well as having nostalgia value for a large number of twentysomething year olds. 

 

But I actually think it's better that Bionicle ended before that happened, since it opens up the possibility of Bionicle being rebooted later with a feature film series.

 

Except that Lego had many pitches for live action Bionicle movies and rejected all of them since they invariably involved humans in the Bionicle universe. Hero Factory doesn't have that problem: a great deal of early media included humans, and there's never been anything to suggest that humans didn't exist in the Hero Factory universe.

On top of that, the Hero Factory movie is still far from a certainty. All we really know is that people have expressed interest in such a thing, but no final decisions have been made. Keep in mind that the lack of a theatrical Bionicle movie was also partly due to the previous Bionicle movies only achieving moderate sales (which is the reason for the long hiatus between Web of Shadows and The Legend Reborn).

 

A Bionicle film revival could potentially happen at some point, but I wouldn't count on it any time soon. Lego hasn't shown any desire recently to look back to past successes like Bionicle when they're currently enjoying even greater success with new theme launches like Ninjago and Friends. And while the movie could potentially court what's left of the now-grown Bionicle fandom (those who hadn't become disillusioned with the theme over the course of its long run), without a return of the sets I fear that it would have insufficient appeal for the kids who would be its target audience.

[Alyska]

Ah, but see, I think that Bionicle has the potential to reach outside what most people would call the fandom. Not everyone who went to see the Transformers films is a die-hard adult fan who watches the show, collects the toys, posts on TF forums, edits fan wikis and otherwise participates in a fan community. There are many people who went to see those films who hadn't watched a Transformers cartoon in ten years, but had fond memories of the show when they were a child.  And I'm sure there are plenty of people with a similar nostalgia for the early years of Bionicle.

 

Those are the people that a movie would be aimed at. Not us.We're insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As the Scott Pilgrim movie demonstrated, if you aim soley at the geeks, you're going to fail.

 

And the need to have human or human-looking characters in movies aimed at adults seems to be on the decline. Perhaps we're not quite there yet, but the advances in technology are making it more possible to have nonhuman characters that look believable and relatable without falling into the Uncanny Valley. Then there's the fact that studios like Pixar are slowly breaking down the perception that animation/CGI films with nonhuman characters are for children only. 

 

So, while it's perhaps not as likely to be picked up any more, I don't really see any reason why it couldn't work if it was properly executed.

[Lyichir]

Ah, but see, I think that Bionicle has the potential to reach outside what most people would call the fandom. Not everyone who went to see the Transformers films is a die-hard adult fan who watches the show, collects the toys, posts on TF forums, edits fan wikis and otherwise participates in a fan community. There are many people who went to see those films who hadn't watched a Transformers cartoon in ten years, but had fond memories of the show when they were a child.  And I'm sure there are plenty of people with a similar nostalgia for the early years of Bionicle.

 

Those are the people that a movie would be aimed at. Not us.We're insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As the Scott Pilgrim movie demonstrated, if you aim soley at the geeks, you're going to fail.

 

And the need to have human or human-looking characters in movies aimed at adults seems to be on the decline. Perhaps we're not quite there yet, but the advances in technology are making it more possible to have nonhuman characters that look believable and relatable without falling into the Uncanny Valley. Then there's the fact that studios like Pixar are slowly breaking down the perception that animation/CGI films with nonhuman characters are for children only. 

 

So, while it's perhaps not as likely to be picked up any more, I don't really see any reason why it couldn't work if it was properly executed.

I don't think Bionicle ever reached the kind of cultural saturation in its ten-year run that Transformers did over its 25-year run before the movie. With Transformers, almost every kid born in the past 30 or so years had at least been aware of Transformers in some way (even if only by seeing commercials for the toys on TV). Bionicle had less than half that time to be noticed, and now that it's ended awareness of the theme is going down, not up (Transformers, after all, never really "ended" completely).

 

Plus, Transformers already had a number of aspects in common with traditional summer blockbuster movies: taking place in the real world, having human characters for audiences to relate to, featuring a disaster scenario in real world cities, having a simple to understand premise, etc. Compared to those, the mythology-heavy Bionicle storyline feels at best like Lord of the Rings (but with hardly a fraction of its cultural saturation), and at worst like poorly-performing fantasy films like The Dark Crystal.

[CHTrilogy]

The only way it can be live action is through stop-motion.

[MisterGryphon]

The only way it can be live action is through stop-motion.

 

 

This, although it would be fairly expensive that way as well. IMO, CGI is the only good way to do it.

 

Ah, but see, I think that Bionicle has the potential to reach outside what most people would call the fandom. Not everyone who went to see the Transformers films is a die-hard adult fan who watches the show, collects the toys, posts on TF forums, edits fan wikis and otherwise participates in a fan community. There are many people who went to see those films who hadn't watched a Transformers cartoon in ten years, but had fond memories of the show when they were a child.  And I'm sure there are plenty of people with a similar nostalgia for the early years of Bionicle.

 

Those are the people that a movie would be aimed at. Not us.We're insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As the Scott Pilgrim movie demonstrated, if you aim soley at the geeks, you're going to fail.

 

And the need to have human or human-looking characters in movies aimed at adults seems to be on the decline. Perhaps we're not quite there yet, but the advances in technology are making it more possible to have nonhuman characters that look believable and relatable without falling into the Uncanny Valley. Then there's the fact that studios like Pixar are slowly breaking down the perception that animation/CGI films with nonhuman characters are for children only. 

 

So, while it's perhaps not as likely to be picked up any more, I don't really see any reason why it couldn't work if it was properly executed.

I don't think Bionicle ever reached the kind of cultural saturation in its ten-year run that Transformers did over its 25-year run before the movie. With Transformers, almost every kid born in the past 30 or so years had at least been aware of Transformers in some way (even if only by seeing commercials for the toys on TV). Bionicle had less than half that time to be noticed, and now that it's ended awareness of the theme is going down, not up (Transformers, after all, never really "ended" completely).

 

Plus, Transformers already had a number of aspects in common with traditional summer blockbuster movies: taking place in the real world, having human characters for audiences to relate to, featuring a disaster scenario in real world cities, having a simple to understand premise, etc. Compared to those, the mythology-heavy Bionicle storyline feels at best like Lord of the Rings (but with hardly a fraction of its cultural saturation), and at worst like poorly-performing fantasy films like The Dark Crystal.

 

 

 

I quote enjoyed The Dark Crystal.

[bluefish]

Weeelll, I think Brad Pitt might make a good Tahu. That's just me though.

[Karzhani the Utahraptor]

Having a live action cast play the roles of Bionicle characters would be nothing short of disastrous, because of technical and movement limitations. However, it might be possible hypothetically to use CGI Bionicle Characters in tandem with real actors, in a sort of Transformers-like way 

[Lyichir]

 

The only way it can be live action is through stop-motion.

 

 

This, although it would be fairly expensive that way as well. IMO, CGI is the only good way to do it.

 

Ah, but see, I think that Bionicle has the potential to reach outside what most people would call the fandom. Not everyone who went to see the Transformers films is a die-hard adult fan who watches the show, collects the toys, posts on TF forums, edits fan wikis and otherwise participates in a fan community. There are many people who went to see those films who hadn't watched a Transformers cartoon in ten years, but had fond memories of the show when they were a child.  And I'm sure there are plenty of people with a similar nostalgia for the early years of Bionicle.

 

Those are the people that a movie would be aimed at. Not us.We're insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As the Scott Pilgrim movie demonstrated, if you aim soley at the geeks, you're going to fail.

 

And the need to have human or human-looking characters in movies aimed at adults seems to be on the decline. Perhaps we're not quite there yet, but the advances in technology are making it more possible to have nonhuman characters that look believable and relatable without falling into the Uncanny Valley. Then there's the fact that studios like Pixar are slowly breaking down the perception that animation/CGI films with nonhuman characters are for children only. 

 

So, while it's perhaps not as likely to be picked up any more, I don't really see any reason why it couldn't work if it was properly executed.

I don't think Bionicle ever reached the kind of cultural saturation in its ten-year run that Transformers did over its 25-year run before the movie. With Transformers, almost every kid born in the past 30 or so years had at least been aware of Transformers in some way (even if only by seeing commercials for the toys on TV). Bionicle had less than half that time to be noticed, and now that it's ended awareness of the theme is going down, not up (Transformers, after all, never really "ended" completely).

 

Plus, Transformers already had a number of aspects in common with traditional summer blockbuster movies: taking place in the real world, having human characters for audiences to relate to, featuring a disaster scenario in real world cities, having a simple to understand premise, etc. Compared to those, the mythology-heavy Bionicle storyline feels at best like Lord of the Rings (but with hardly a fraction of its cultural saturation), and at worst like poorly-performing fantasy films like The Dark Crystal.

 

 

 

I quote enjoyed The Dark Crystal.

 

I did too. But a movie being enjoyable doesn't necessarily mean it'll be successful (although, looking it up on Wikipedia, The Dark Crystal did okay at the box office, so I might have been thinking of something else). My point was that the farther a movie is from realism, the harder it will be for it to perform well at the box office. Bionicle doesn't just lack humans, but also takes place in a world completely different from our own, with its own rules. That kind of premise alienates audiences, and while those sorts of movies can be successful, the odds are stacked against them compared to fantasy movies like Lord of the Rings, which at least generally feature humans and other human-like races, or superhero movies, which feature outlandish characters and powers but in realistic settings.

[Jedi Knight Krazy]

I've thought about this before, and the obvious answer is no, it wouldn't work, because there are no human characters in Bionicle.

 

But what if there were?

 

Remember that movies always deviate from their canon source. Bionicle is a dead line, so a live-action movie need only be loosely inspired by the original story.

 

So let's say we wanted to make 2001 into a live-action movie; seems like a good place to start. Let's tweak the backstory a bit: the Great Beings are futuristic humans from Earth (not much of a deviation from the original story, to be honest - the Great Beings are confirmed in canon to not be human but act a lot like us). There was no Shattering - Mata Nui was simply sent out to investigate life on other planets. Many years later, he returns, but crash-lands on Earth (he's also a lot smaller because canon Mata Nui wouldn't fit on Earth) and creates his disguise-island. The Toa Mata are sent out as the failsafe to reboot Mata Nui, but oops! The canisters shoot out of Karda Nui and hit an airplane that just happens to be flying overhead. The plane crashes on Mata Nui (Bionicle + Lost = win) and the six sole survivors of the plane crash have to don the dead Toa Mata's armor and save the island.

 

Sure, it's not the Bionicle that I grew up with, but I'd still watch it.

[MisterGryphon]

I've thought about this before, and the obvious answer is no, it wouldn't work, because there are no human characters in Bionicle.

 

But what if there were?

 

Remember that movies always deviate from their canon source. Bionicle is a dead line, so a live-action movie need only be loosely inspired by the original story.

 

So let's say we wanted to make 2001 into a live-action movie; seems like a good place to start. Let's tweak the backstory a bit: the Great Beings are futuristic humans from Earth (not much of a deviation from the original story, to be honest - the Great Beings are confirmed in canon to not be human but act a lot like us). There was no Shattering - Mata Nui was simply sent out to investigate life on other planets. Many years later, he returns, but crash-lands on Earth (he's also a lot smaller because canon Mata Nui wouldn't fit on Earth) and creates his disguise-island. The Toa Mata are sent out as the failsafe to reboot Mata Nui, but oops! The canisters shoot out of Karda Nui and hit an airplane that just happens to be flying overhead. The plane crashes on Mata Nui (Bionicle + Lost = win) and the six sole survivors of the plane crash have to don the dead Toa Mata's armor and save the island.

 

Sure, it's not the Bionicle that I grew up with, but I'd still watch it.

 

 

I'll give an example of something that greatly deviated from the original story (although not because of inability to recreate the story in a movie, because the original was quite short): Horton Hears a Who. If the Bionicle movie was like that, I'd quite enjoy it. I'm going to say it would be a "not that great if you compare it to the original, but in it's own way, not compared to Bionicle, it's pretty decent."

[The G-Man]

The director who's the obvious choice is Peter Jackson, though I have my own deep set thoughts on how a Bionicle film series should be attempted; but given that I'm going to film school in about a year and a half to hopefully start a career in such things, I VILL NOT TELL YA!

[Samhain]

So let's say we wanted to make 2001 into a live-action movie; seems like a good place to start. Let's tweak the backstory a bit: the Great Beings are futuristic humans from Earth (not much of a deviation from the original story, to be honest - the Great Beings are confirmed in canon to not be human but act a lot like us). There was no Shattering - Mata Nui was simply sent out to investigate life on other planets. Many years later, he returns, but crash-lands on Earth (he's also a lot smaller because canon Mata Nui wouldn't fit on Earth) and creates his disguise-island. The Toa Mata are sent out as the failsafe to reboot Mata Nui, but oops! The canisters shoot out of Karda Nui and hit an airplane that just happens to be flying overhead. The plane crashes on Mata Nui (Bionicle + Lost = win) and the six sole survivors of the plane crash have to don the dead Toa Mata's armor and save the island.

 

Sure, it's not the Bionicle that I grew up with, but I'd still watch it.

Or you could go with the original story, with Mata Nui and Makuta being more spiritual/god-like beings. After all it was the thing that drew a lot of the fans to Bionicle in the first place, in that sense no canon is essentially destroyed and it can be introduced to new fans in a way that does not require several thousand footnotes. Said new fans could then view the other media in the same order we did and get an experience not too different then ours (in terms of story reactions anyway).

[Sir Flex Nardius]

Avatar grade CGI and some real backgrounds would be pretty awesome though.

[Lyichir]

 

So let's say we wanted to make 2001 into a live-action movie; seems like a good place to start. Let's tweak the backstory a bit: the Great Beings are futuristic humans from Earth (not much of a deviation from the original story, to be honest - the Great Beings are confirmed in canon to not be human but act a lot like us). There was no Shattering - Mata Nui was simply sent out to investigate life on other planets. Many years later, he returns, but crash-lands on Earth (he's also a lot smaller because canon Mata Nui wouldn't fit on Earth) and creates his disguise-island. The Toa Mata are sent out as the failsafe to reboot Mata Nui, but oops! The canisters shoot out of Karda Nui and hit an airplane that just happens to be flying overhead. The plane crashes on Mata Nui (Bionicle + Lost = win) and the six sole survivors of the plane crash have to don the dead Toa Mata's armor and save the island.

 

Sure, it's not the Bionicle that I grew up with, but I'd still watch it.

Or you could go with the original story, with Mata Nui and Makuta being more spiritual/god-like beings. After all it was the thing that drew a lot of the fans to Bionicle in the first place, in that sense no canon is essentially destroyed and it can be introduced to new fans in a way that does not require several thousand footnotes. Said new fans could then view the other media in the same order we did and get an experience not too different then ours (in terms of story reactions anyway).

 

Actually, Mata Nui was intended to be the robot beneath the island since before the theme even started, and I'm sure Makuta was intended to have a physical form revealed at some point as well. The spiritual metaphors served the purpose of keeping the theme's mystery intact. In fact, a movie could potentially take the form of a backup plan for the theme's story: Lego considered having the Great Spirit robot actually awakened and revealed as early as the end of the first year, if sales didn't perform up to expectations. Of course, if such a movie took that idea and was successful, it might not leave much room for a sequel.

[MisterGryphon]

The director who's the obvious choice is Peter Jackson, though I have my own deep set thoughts on how a Bionicle film series should be attempted; but given that I'm going to film school in about a year and a half to hopefully start a career in such things, I VILL NOT TELL YA!

 

 

 

.....Michael Bay? xD

[Alyska]

Ohohoh no. Don't make me drag out my set of Bayonicle jokes again. You will regret it.

 

 

But after doing a bit more research on motion capture, I think I'm actually going to have to agree with Lychir. Motion capture generally needs to be done on a green screen background in a very controlled environment, so an entirely mocapped cast on real backgrounds would actually be kind of pointless. You'd just have camera crews going out, filming patches of forest from different angles with no actors in place. It would make building sets of any kind pointless, and it would really be much better just to create everything on the computer.

 

But I actually think it would be nicer if we got to the point where motion capture was a viable option for TV series, and had a Bionicle TV show rather than a film. I think the story would work out better if it had more screentime to develop the characters and plot. In the direct to DVD films so far, we've always ended up with some important details being neglected as a result of trying to compress things.  

[MisterGryphon]

Ohohoh no. Don't make me drag out my set of Bayonicle jokes again. You will regret it.

 

 

But after doing a bit more research on motion capture, I think I'm actually going to have to agree with Lychir. Motion capture generally needs to be done on a green screen background in a very controlled environment, so an entirely mocapped cast on real backgrounds would actually be kind of pointless. You'd just have camera crews going out, filming patches of forest from different angles with no actors in place. It would make building sets of any kind pointless, and it would really be much better just to create everything on the computer.

 

But I actually think it would be nicer if we got to the point where motion capture was a viable option for TV series, and had a Bionicle TV show rather than a film. I think the story would work out better if it had more screentime to develop the characters and plot. In the direct to DVD films so far, we've always ended up with some important details being neglected as a result of trying to compress things.  

 

 

I'd actually like to read some Bayonicle jokes.

[Flaredrick: Forgotten One]

I have plans on making a saga of Bionicle movies. But there going show life here on Earth, disguised as humans.

PM me to know more.

Edited by The Forgotten One, Dec 16 2012 - 09:37 PM.