My transition to the world of Lego Hero Factory becomes still more complete today with the bold move of the Zeyek chronicler character into the HF universe. In this video you get to hear Zeyek's voice for the very first time, and see my very first elementary (i.e. terrible) attempt at stop motion...
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u6_Lfmfmwk
[Blogger's note: See my new creations on my unofficial LEGO Hero Factory MOCs blog and also follow my YouTube videos!]
Showing posts with label zeyek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zeyek. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
I live!
Rumors of my demise have been, well, wrong :) Ok honestly, I don't know if there have been any such rumors, but I have obviously been embarassingly absent for the past few months. You see, I got into LEGO Bionicle building to relieve stress from a demanding job. Late last September, though, I actually quit that job and have since been giving most of my attention to the websites I've been running for almost 10 years in another hobby.
I'm happy to report that I'm all mentally recovered from work and things are going great with my other sites, so I'll again be able to do some occasional updates in the Bionicle world. Thus far, I've only published about half of my MOCs, even counting the Ardaberry Fikou above (when sitting on a leaf or green vine the legs are camoflaged and all you see is the body, which looks like, you guessed it, an Ardaberry). I have many things to share yet and Zeyek has more stories to tell! On top of all that, I still have 15 to 20 pounds of unused parts just waiting to be assembled!
It's both surprising and humbling to see that the the popularity of my two Bionicle homes on the web has actually steadily increased, so to all of my visitors, a hearty thank you for your support! I'm looking forward to the next chapters!
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Bionicle MOCs: Rilovian history adjustment
In Zeyek's introductory post about the Rilovians, there was one photo that bothered me a bit. It was this one:
The thing is, though I had tried hard to mix up masks and equipment to both ensure good variety between all of the Rilovian MOCs and also to keep them from looking like Matoran analogues, I accidentally failed at the latter part with the elders. I see some serious commonality with a couple of like-colored Turaga in there! Matau & Nokama anyone? Argh. Today I got a package from an eBay seller that helped me to remedy this embarassing predicament like so:
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Voilla! Now I feel much better. Here's the whole crew with the updated old dudes:
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The thing is, though I had tried hard to mix up masks and equipment to both ensure good variety between all of the Rilovian MOCs and also to keep them from looking like Matoran analogues, I accidentally failed at the latter part with the elders. I see some serious commonality with a couple of like-colored Turaga in there! Matau & Nokama anyone? Argh. Today I got a package from an eBay seller that helped me to remedy this embarassing predicament like so:
Voilla! Now I feel much better. Here's the whole crew with the updated old dudes:
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Bionicle MOC: Milethi
The latest post from Zeyek is up and features a new character named Milethi, my first female Bionicle creation.
Milethi is as much of a lone ranger in her field as Zeyek is in his. Needing to give her some special equipment to match her unique status on the universe-wide playing field, I realized I had finally found a perfect recipient for my purple-hued sun-damaged copper Huna. Literally everything was built out & down from the mask, focusing on decent height (about 9 1/2"), confidence, and femininity (even got heels in there). Most of the structure is completely custom, with a Mistika Onua front piece giving just the triangular shape I wanted for the middle of the torso (doesn't show up so well in this photo). I'm not entirely sure what she has in her hand. Let's just call it a ceremonial scepter, shall we?
Milethi is as much of a lone ranger in her field as Zeyek is in his. Needing to give her some special equipment to match her unique status on the universe-wide playing field, I realized I had finally found a perfect recipient for my purple-hued sun-damaged copper Huna. Literally everything was built out & down from the mask, focusing on decent height (about 9 1/2"), confidence, and femininity (even got heels in there). Most of the structure is completely custom, with a Mistika Onua front piece giving just the triangular shape I wanted for the middle of the torso (doesn't show up so well in this photo). I'm not entirely sure what she has in her hand. Let's just call it a ceremonial scepter, shall we?
Friday, July 31, 2009
Welcome, fellow Bionicle lovers!
Greetings! Thank you for stopping by! Zeyek's BIONICLE: Untold is my latest Internet venture, a log of fictitious stories I created to breath a little extra life into my newest hobby, building Lego Bionicle MOCs ("My Own Creations," literally just custom builds). Speaking of stories, allow me to tell you the completely true story of how I got into Bionicle building to begin with.
I originally played with Legos as a young child. In fact, the very earliest set I remember having was #6383, Public Works Center, at the turn of the 1980's. I did a bunch of tinkering, but eventually moved on to bigger & "better" things like slot cars and HO scale trains. It wasn't until the turn of the 21st century that I made a long-overdue return to the wonderful world of Lego, using over 12,500 parts to build a long cityscape display along a wall at my place of work. You can see more about all that at my homepage. I pretty quickly took the plunge into Technic, eventually buying two original Mindstorms sets and several of the add-on packs to mess around with autonomous vehicles & walkers. Just when I was picking up steam with the 'bots, though, again I took a detour, this time getting into pro-level radio-controlled (R/C) racing & engineering (more about that on my numerous RC sites). All of the Mindstorms stuff went up on eBay, and my remaining System parts went into buckets to collect dust in the garage while I went off gaining a little bit of fame & fortune in the surprisingly vast & vibrant RC world.
In early 2009, I was working as a senior designer at PayPal. You know, PayPal, that site you can use to pay for stuff on eBay & thousands of other places, or to send money to friends & family online. I had taken on the task of designing small pieces of web pages (we called them "standards") that could be assembled together to build complete pages and even whole new PayPal products. It was kind of like designing Lego blocks, and teaching people how to use them. Well, there came a point where I had to give a big presentation to over 100 people in my department to explain what I was doing and why it was going to make all of their lives better. Rather than doing the usual boring, dreary, endless PowerPoint slides full of text that just put people to sleep, I decided to use a Lego theme and present almost exclusively with colorful pictures that I'd narrate in free form. Out of the garage came the buckets of System pieces at last, and I even made a trip to Toys R Us for some newer additions. I created & photographed all of the scenes for the presentation over the course of a weekend, and it was a raging success.
One of the lessons I wanted to teach in this presentation was that for a building block system to work, all of the blocks have to be from the same system. To put this in picture form, I made a couple of scenes featuring parts & creations from different construction toy sets, including Lego System, Duplo, K'Nex, and Magnext. I also threw in a Bionicle set for kicks, because it was cheap and, to the untrained eye at least, its parts clearly wouldn't play well with the others.
I originally played with Legos as a young child. In fact, the very earliest set I remember having was #6383, Public Works Center, at the turn of the 1980's. I did a bunch of tinkering, but eventually moved on to bigger & "better" things like slot cars and HO scale trains. It wasn't until the turn of the 21st century that I made a long-overdue return to the wonderful world of Lego, using over 12,500 parts to build a long cityscape display along a wall at my place of work. You can see more about all that at my homepage. I pretty quickly took the plunge into Technic, eventually buying two original Mindstorms sets and several of the add-on packs to mess around with autonomous vehicles & walkers. Just when I was picking up steam with the 'bots, though, again I took a detour, this time getting into pro-level radio-controlled (R/C) racing & engineering (more about that on my numerous RC sites). All of the Mindstorms stuff went up on eBay, and my remaining System parts went into buckets to collect dust in the garage while I went off gaining a little bit of fame & fortune in the surprisingly vast & vibrant RC world.
In early 2009, I was working as a senior designer at PayPal. You know, PayPal, that site you can use to pay for stuff on eBay & thousands of other places, or to send money to friends & family online. I had taken on the task of designing small pieces of web pages (we called them "standards") that could be assembled together to build complete pages and even whole new PayPal products. It was kind of like designing Lego blocks, and teaching people how to use them. Well, there came a point where I had to give a big presentation to over 100 people in my department to explain what I was doing and why it was going to make all of their lives better. Rather than doing the usual boring, dreary, endless PowerPoint slides full of text that just put people to sleep, I decided to use a Lego theme and present almost exclusively with colorful pictures that I'd narrate in free form. Out of the garage came the buckets of System pieces at last, and I even made a trip to Toys R Us for some newer additions. I created & photographed all of the scenes for the presentation over the course of a weekend, and it was a raging success.
One of the lessons I wanted to teach in this presentation was that for a building block system to work, all of the blocks have to be from the same system. To put this in picture form, I made a couple of scenes featuring parts & creations from different construction toy sets, including Lego System, Duplo, K'Nex, and Magnext. I also threw in a Bionicle set for kicks, because it was cheap and, to the untrained eye at least, its parts clearly wouldn't play well with the others.
I actually took some evil pleasure in poo-pooing on the idea of Bionicles in addition to the other non-Lego System parts. You see, I always hated Bionicle. I hated the whole concept. I saw the original sets in stores back in 2001 and they infuriated me with their special parts and departure from the classic interlocking brick setup that made Legos, well, Legos. To me, any Lego product that wasn't strictly based on the brick system was blasphemy, taking creativity out of one of the most creative toys ever devised.
The particular Bionicle I picked to use in my presentation was the Agori Atakus, from the Bara Magna storyline. I got Atakus in particular because at least the assembled figure looked pretty cool, if you could ever get past the fact that it was a Bionicle and thus a disgrace to the world. It looked cool enough, in fact, that after the presentation, I brought it in to work to add to the decor of my little area of the office. Bad move. Within a few weeks I had bought yet another one of these evil things, Solek the Matoran this time. Then I picked up a Zesk. When I next bought Tarduk, I recognized that I had the start of a collection on my hands. At the same time, my originality instinct started kicking in hard-core, and I itched to create some custom Bionicles, though at that point I had never so much as heard of the term "MOC."
My next Bionicle purchase was on eBay (and paid for with PayPal!). This time instead of buying a set, I bought five or so. Pounds. It was the partly-assembled Bionicle collection of some kid who had already outgrown them. Then came another 5 or so pounds, and another 3, and another 7. By the time I slowed down purchasing these big lots of parts, I had more legs, heads, and ball socket pieces than I thought I would ever be able to use. In the meantime, I had disassembled all of my pre-built sets and done my first dozen or so MOCs, and the rest was history.
As of this writing, I have nearly 60 custom creations ranging in height from 2 inches to 2 feet. Some of these builds are my own personal takes on official ("canon") Bionicle characters, but most were completely made-up, so it was only natural that I would create unique back-stories for them. To avoid conflicting with any of the official storylines, I've devised some new planets and new timeline events, and you'll be seeing some well-developed new civilized races as well as species of Rahi, all told from the viewpoint of Zeyekti-Iiloptinous Mazzourel, the oldest of all Bionicle chroniclers.
I hope you enjoy following my work even a fraction as much as I enjoy doing it! Please do leave comments! I'm unfortunately an unusually busy guy, so I won't always be able to directly respond to individual comments, but I can assure you I'll read every one, and you'll definitely be seeing some responses and follow-ups appearing in future posts.
Just be aware of one thing, though. If you post on Zeyek's site, you'll only ever get responses from Zeyek, not me! ;)
The particular Bionicle I picked to use in my presentation was the Agori Atakus, from the Bara Magna storyline. I got Atakus in particular because at least the assembled figure looked pretty cool, if you could ever get past the fact that it was a Bionicle and thus a disgrace to the world. It looked cool enough, in fact, that after the presentation, I brought it in to work to add to the decor of my little area of the office. Bad move. Within a few weeks I had bought yet another one of these evil things, Solek the Matoran this time. Then I picked up a Zesk. When I next bought Tarduk, I recognized that I had the start of a collection on my hands. At the same time, my originality instinct started kicking in hard-core, and I itched to create some custom Bionicles, though at that point I had never so much as heard of the term "MOC."
My next Bionicle purchase was on eBay (and paid for with PayPal!). This time instead of buying a set, I bought five or so. Pounds. It was the partly-assembled Bionicle collection of some kid who had already outgrown them. Then came another 5 or so pounds, and another 3, and another 7. By the time I slowed down purchasing these big lots of parts, I had more legs, heads, and ball socket pieces than I thought I would ever be able to use. In the meantime, I had disassembled all of my pre-built sets and done my first dozen or so MOCs, and the rest was history.
As of this writing, I have nearly 60 custom creations ranging in height from 2 inches to 2 feet. Some of these builds are my own personal takes on official ("canon") Bionicle characters, but most were completely made-up, so it was only natural that I would create unique back-stories for them. To avoid conflicting with any of the official storylines, I've devised some new planets and new timeline events, and you'll be seeing some well-developed new civilized races as well as species of Rahi, all told from the viewpoint of Zeyekti-Iiloptinous Mazzourel, the oldest of all Bionicle chroniclers.
I hope you enjoy following my work even a fraction as much as I enjoy doing it! Please do leave comments! I'm unfortunately an unusually busy guy, so I won't always be able to directly respond to individual comments, but I can assure you I'll read every one, and you'll definitely be seeing some responses and follow-ups appearing in future posts.
Just be aware of one thing, though. If you post on Zeyek's site, you'll only ever get responses from Zeyek, not me! ;)
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