Playing this trilogy I knew I had experienced the peak of gaming and my life would be changed forever. Thru all the hardships in life these stories are carried in my soul. The ability to truly enjoy the fleeting joys of this life and the strength to endure and grow from life's square hard ships. The importance of everyone in my life friend or foe, we are all in a party taking out turns in this life. Biding our time until we can finally kill god.
Getting so desperate for kingdom hearts related media, Im digging into Utada's classic works. This is running parallel to getting obsessive about file meta data. So I put together this art for their first english release under the band name "Cubic U"
I stopped playing fallout the moment I realized that if Fallout 3 had you emerge from Vault "111" it would not only add up to "3" but also be the roman numeral III.
Bionicle -The Chronological Cut- The Journey to One (Movie) ... [part 2/2]
Previously on Bionicle:
💬 0 🔁 4 ❤️ 6 · Bionicle -The Chronological Cut- The Journey to One (Movie) ... [part 1/2] · Gathered friends, listen to the legend of how
Transition From ... LOMN to MOL
The bulk on my time on this project was concerning this segment. Which is fitting enough since between LOMN to MOL a thousand years pass by in a cross-fade. The labored issue is that MOL has credits over its opening shots. It a bit inconvenient for credits to appear in the back third of a movie, I wanted to scoop those out for the sake of the picture. But to get there we have to get from ocean waves to lava fields, much like Takua himself in MNOG.
Again I had to cut off Vakama's closing thoughts as we're not quiet done with this legend yet. Ducking down to Nathan Furst's "Island of Mata Nui" as the camera pans up, the Unity Duty Destiny symbol, pained out of the sky. Kidtoon's "The Legend Reborn" had just the footage I was looking for to get us from here to there. Under Mata Nui's opening narration on LRB we start on the sandy shores of the name sake island. Next we travel to Mount Mangai, named in tribute to Toa Lhikan, a continuation of what we saw begin on the beach. Finally high in the clouds looking down over the entire island. This mirrors the tour that LOMN begins with across Metru Nui, and establishes us in a new place. I kept John D'Andrea's beautiful "From Endings to Beginnings" over the LRB footage, that track crescendos as the island would be destroyed. Instead I segued into Nathan Furst's "Legends of Metru Nui" since we missed out on hearing it early on. The pounding drums on the track also made it easy to hide the audio cuts. Until finally the original audio comes back in, including Jaller's initial dialog. I performed some color correction on the LRB footage to help give it the same temperature as the Creative Capers trilogy footage.
Now that we're up in the clouds we can come back down. Returning to MOL as we inevitably arrive at Ta-Koro.
Cleaning up ... MOL
There were six scenes that needed doctoring.
Screenplay by Henry Gilroy superimposed over the clouds above the island. This one was simple, since the text was over the noise of clouds, I applied mosaic to the image to get just the blocks of color. Then blurred it to cover up text.
2. Story by Henry Gilroy, Alastair Sinnerton, Bob Thompson, and Greg Weisman over the castle gate. This is where it started getting tricky. There were enough clouds for the mosaic and blur trick again. But eventually the clouds part, revealing the definite shapes of the castle gate. So I extended the noise of the clouds and created a heat haze effect to obscure the text. The effect breaks just as the text clears. The camera zooms into the castle gate.
3. Music by Nathan Furst over the courtyard. This shot introduces a character moving through the scene, luckily Jaller doesn't walk under the text, yet... I painted together several frames into a single matte. I masked around Jaller's walk for 152 frames. Then matched the matte painting position and scale with the original camera movement.
4. Executive Producers Conny Kalcher and Bob Thompson. This shot finally sits still but Jaller strolls right below the onscreen text. Hiding the text was the easy part, an empty still covered up the text. For the moments Jaller intersects with text I painted over 45 offending frames.
5. Produced by Sue Shakespeare over the tower. This shot was basically a repeat trick. I made a composite matte painting of the tower from multiple frames. Then tracked it over the original scene to obscure the text. I recreated the original lens flare effect from the source to keep the life of the shot.
6. Directed by Terry Shakespeare and David Molina over lava. This was the most complicated shot of them all. I started off with the same matte painting trick to cover up the text. Then combined with the mosaic-blur method to bring back in the evolving smoke over the frozen image. Finally Jaller enters back into the scene. Unfortunately he walks behind the entire length of text among the smoke. My first try at fixing this was reanimating Jaller from scratch with flash animation. But it looked as janky as you could imagine. Instead, since Jaller eventually clears the text I masked out the last leg of his walk and re-timed it over the edited scene. Now he enters the shot at the same moment but further along the path than before.
The final result:
"TAKUA!"
Saucing Up ... MOL
MOL acts as the bookends to the Toa Metru story, and I wanted to bridge the two arcs together with some visual flare. Between the halves of the movie the theme of heroic transformation is a constant. LOMN introduces us to each hero and their home with their own title card, so I created graphics to match for the destined seventh toa, Takua.
This also provided an opportunity to elaborate the ludicrous lore that one thousand years have passed between the transition from LOMN to MOL.
Finally MOL can play to the very end. The Makuta is finally defeated (?) and the matoran return to their abandoned home. The epilogue from WOS comes in to close the whole thing out.
Ending with ... WOS
I amped up the beam of light at the end of MOL into a full screen flash to transition back into Vakama's shining story stones. He finally gets to finish his final-finale speech. Fade out on the Unity, Duty, Destiny symbol. This was the way of the Bionicle.
Finishing touches ... Subtitles/et cetera
I re-enumerated all of the chapter time codes from their original films into the super cut. I wanted to include subtitles with this edit as well. I'll sum this up with this image:
It was an extremely convoluted and annoying process. The result, you can watch the whole movie subbed in the original Matoran:
Thanking you for taking the time to read my rambling, I hope you check out the movie, and enjoy it!
andulkaphoto
snowghoul
janainaart
yousharknotpass
