So, I spent last weekend at a Lego event in eastern Finland, showcasing my mocs and whatnot. On Saturday one of the visitors started chatting with me, seemingly inspired by my bio-mocs. He talked in English, so he seemed to have foreign origins. As it turned out, he had worked at LEGO in Denmark some 15 years ago during Bionicle’s early days. He was a web developer back then, but he told me a story about a colleague of his, whom worked at the animation department. I’d never heard of this one, so I thought it’d be something nice to share with you.
Take the following story with a grain of salt as I don’t remember some of the details so well, so this’ll be what I think is how it went.
Okay, are we good? Good.
So, the man told me that Lego makes these animations about their sets to improve their marketing to retailers. They’re different from the typical ads, I assume. Instead of showing boring still shots of the sets, the animations help the retailers decide whether they want to start selling the sets by showing them in action.
Onto Bionicle G1. The animator colleague the man told about was once tasked to create one of these animations for one of the early Bionicle sets. He described the set as ‘shark-headed’, so with some thinking we guessed it was probably the Muaka & Kane-Ra set.
As you know, Lego has guidelines about “play value”, which bans firearms and violent material from their content.
So, in the animation the Muaka had blood splatters on the corners of its mouth, though they were colored blue due to these guidelines. One of the animator’s superiors who came by found the blue blood lame and told him to make it red. The superior apparently loved halloween and gore. So, now the animation had a Muaka with a bloody mouth and was nearing its completion and the animator loved it.
Then a different superior who was guideline-happy came by and was shocked by the blood and told him to turn it back blue. The animator didn’t want this, so he actually called the first superior and asked him to come by and say it was too late to correct anything, and the man happily agreed.
So, the first superior came back and said that the schedule was too tight and the animation had to be out very soon. The second superior was quite annoyed, but in the end the bloody version of the animation went to the retailers, for better or for worse.
In the end the Muaka & Kane-Ra set was a best seller that year in terms of stock orders thanks to the animation. =D
