Hello, Mr. Farshtey. Thank you for taking time out of your day to answer my question. I have always been curious as to how much creative freedom you were given when writing the Bionicle story. Did the Lego Group give you a detailed outline of each year’s plot, or more of a general direction?
I hope I don’t sound like I’m accusing TLG of restricting or censoring you. Obviously they had plans for Bionicle’s story, and I just would like to know how much influence you had on those plans.
When I first started on BIONICLE, I wasn’t on the story team, but the people who were proved to be very open to discussion and suggestion. In my later years, I was part of the story team. Main story for the year came from that team, so we knew where it had to start and where it had to end. How it got there was left somewhat open. And, of course, there were a decent number of books that were side stories and I had the freedom to make those up. I can’t say I ever had a BIONICLE story that got totally rejected – I did have ideas for Hero Factory and NINJAGO that had to get turned down for one reason or another, or changed, but not so much with BIONICLE.
Wow. Thank you for answering my question!