An Interview Based BIONICLE Documentary Series
Our first episode explores the true origin of LEGO Constraction; it wasn’t Christian Faber’s Cybots. This is not a story that’s been told before, as we were the ones to uncover it.
Originally this series was made for Modularity, but we decided to branch it off onto its own channel and we briefly explain what it’s all about here:
Behind Behind BIONICLE - A Brief History
This project started out as an idea I had all the way back in late 2016 when I was editing Connecting the Joints for Modularity. I got Slime involved in early 2017 and based on an idea I had, I asked her to design the logo on August 9th, 2017, and she got back the next day with the one we’re still using. We did some initial research in 2018 and 2019, but things really started properly when I made a Discord server for the project on May 15th, 2020.
I began making a source list, which accumulated around 300-400 sources, depending on how you want to count it. We extracted, categorized, and cross-referenced the information in each so that we could be accurate about what we’d talk about.
In 2020, we also started emailing various individuals who worked on BIONICLE. A few got back to us, such as Christian Faber and Alastair Swinnerton. We sent an email in Janurary 2021 to a small company called DEVELOPA, which I had found in 2018 or 2019, during that initial research phase, but after an initial response, we didn’t really hear back from them.
The plan to do interviews came after TTV did their’s with Faber. We’d always been trying to interview him, so once TTV had done so, we asked him a month later and conducted it on May 25th, 2021.
I had the idea to email DEVELOPA again in Jun 22nd, 2021, and this time the guy who got back to us, Andrew Nagel, was interested in helping us out with our series. He had to first recieve permission from the LEGO Group’s legal department before we could interview him.
Andrew recieved permission from them on Sept 1st, 2021 and the rest is history…
As we mention in that video, we did a ton of research for this series as we wanted to originally make it script based. However, it ended up working better solely with interviews, so I’d been making threads on Bird Chatter to showcase some of our findings.
(We’ve also got an Instant Gramble).
The series was created by @Waj (whoever that is) and @Political_Slime. With Mid Blue acting as a video advisor, and featuring art by @Pakari.
The first season will comprise of 4 episodes which’ll center around concept design. It’ll roughly follow this structure:
E1 - Constraction
E2 - Slizer/Throwbots & Roboriders
E3 - Boneheads of Voodoo Island
E4 - BIONICLE
After that, our plan is to make further seasons that delve deeper into other aspects of design, such as: product, marketing, story, game, movie etc.
Huge thanks to everyone who has helped make this project a reality! We could not have done this without all of the people we interviewed, such as Andrew Nagel and Christian Faber. Also big shout out to Pakari for his stellar job on the artwork!
