Bringing LEGO BIONICLE to Life!

Bringing LEGO BIONICLE to Life!
Magazine Article
Issue	January-February 2015

Bringing LEGO BIONICLE to Life! was an article in the January-February edition of the LEGO Club Magazine. The article featured an interview with LEGO Senior Design Manager Cerim Manovi in order to promote BIONICLE's 2015 reboot.

Contents

When six Toa arrive on a mysterious island to battle a great evil, an epic story begins. The launch of BIONICLE is one of the biggest LEGO stories of the year, and this amazing tale comes with some of the most exciting sets ever. We caught up with Senior Design Manager Cerim Manovi to ask him how these models came to be.

Q: How does a set concept begin? Does it spring from the story, or does the story come from the sets?

Mostly it starts from both ends. We start with an initial idea or what we call a Brief. Then we investigate both directions.

First of all, we have to know who the characters are (the Toa, the Protectors, and the villains) and what kind of physical play pattern we want to create. We also need to know how many sets we are going to make.

Then we try to map out the storyline and see how that fits together.

Q: Once you have an idea, do you start building right away? Or is there preliminary work that has to be done?

After many hours of brainstorming, concept work, and story writing, our sketch work begins. That includes paper sketching, digital painting, 3d work and of course building the sets. It is a funny but also complex development process and sets, story, and play have to work together.

Q: What are some of the challenges you face in building an action figure?

The challenge is how we can tell a story with one or two characters in a set. The tricky part is not the character itself because there are a thousand ways of making a cool character. The challenge is the story in the set. But how we master that remains a secret.

Q: Do you have a favorite January 2015 BIONICLE set?

Of course we love all our sets because they have a lot to offer.

From the Protectors to the Toa to the villains, we think they are really cool sets with a lot of awesome features and functions like the masks of power, the dual weapons, the battle arms, the mask pop-off function, the skull spiders and many more.

But, if I have to be honest, Kopaka the master of ice and the Protector of Jungle are pretty awesome sets.

Being a LEGO BIONICLE designer is a really awesome job. It has lots of fun and challenges that push our creativity beyond the universe, in order to provide you with the best sets.

External Links

• Bringing LEGO BIONICLE to Life! LEGO Club Magazine January-February 2015: page 1, page 2 (archived on www.biomediaproject.com)