Release Timing And Scale Of Robots
It seems that for the most part, the Mata Nui Saga is being well accepted. I agree with most of the people saying the cool art, coupled with the excellent voiceover by Michael Dorn, really lends BIONICLE an epic feeling - which is exactly what we wanted. I'm pleased that for the most people are enjoying it.
There are two things that come up regularly, which I'd like to quickly address: Scale of the robots, and timing of all story media.
First, the scale.
Yes, the scale is difficult to portray, especially when we want to get other smaller characters into the foreground. If it were done exactly to scale, all you'd really see would be a big old foot towering into the sky, and then maybe the robot's eyes glinting high in orbit. Hard to get the epicness you're going for with that scale. So, in order to really get the message across, the robots are portrayed the best way the artist could find. Personally, I think he did a great job of getting across the hugeness of the robots. You look at the artwork, and think, "Those things are frigging huge." So yes, there are some liberties taken with the scale, but I don't think it necessarily negates the story or epicness of what we're portraying.
Also, please remember that a majority of people looking at this will be relatively younger, and probably won't be thinking about scale. The important thing is to show two big robots and how they interact (in this case, forcefully). In that, I believe the MNS images are a success.
Second, the story.
We have the story being told in several venues: the BIONICLE.com "Story" page, the BIONICLEstory serials, Journey's End, the comics, and the Mata Nui Saga. When deciding how to portray the 2010 BIONICLE story, we had two ways of going with story in multiple media.
One, we could've had multiple sub-stories in different media leading up to a single resolution in one place. That broadens the story for those who are able and willing to follow it from book to comic to web, but not everyone is going to be able or willing to do that. It's easy for somebody (who doesn't get the comic, for instance) to miss something.
Two, we could tell the overall story in different media, and focus on different levels of detail. This is what we chose, for several reasons:
- We have a single epic tale to finish. I think it has more impact being told in multiple media.
- Marketing message: we have a couple of messages to get across. One is the golden armor on the Stars; another is the giant robot battle in the sky. We needed to convey these messages across as many media as possible, so we couldn't fragment the storytelling.
- Time & budget: of course, it would've been nice to have some really nice video for this, but we didn't have the time or budget to do that. We could do text and images, so we tried to do those the best we could.
- Multiple storylines mean having to tie up multiple plot threads. In essence, 2010 is wrapping up the biggest story threads for the entire BIONICLE story (basically, Mata Nui's story). This is so important it didn't need to be fragmented.
Telling the story in this manner is a conscious and well-planned decision. While not everyone may be happy getting the "same" story in different venues, it does fulfill our marketing goals of spreading the story as widely as possible, and helps tie up as many loose ends as we can - for now, of course, since Greg will continue writing about BIONICLE.
If you'd only gotten the comics, or only gotten the book, or only gotten the MNS... you wouldn't have gotten the full picture. Together, they create a whole that's more than the sum of their parts, a montage that presents a detailed picture of one of the most important chapters in BIONICLE's story.
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