I thought this movie was great! Especially in the realm of voice acting. Kalmah was especially amazing, but they were all great. I also really loved Nocturn’s voice for some reason lol
I think even though I loved it and it was made with lots of heart, some flaws should be named for the sake of future improvement.
I thought that perhaps the special effects could use a bit of work (although I will say that the whole focus changing from character to character was a good idea and gave the impression of depth), I believe something that would have helped was maybe giving the characters and objects filters to match their surroundings, so give them all a bit of a blue tint to match the ocean. Also the bubbles were weird lol.
I also think you should try experimenting with different camera angles, like low angles (I know, those are hard to do with Bionicles because of their size, but try setting them up on a table, looking up at the table with the camera and zooming in so it gives the impression of being life-size). Also, it doesn’t hurt to set your camera to macro every now and then when doing a closeup, although it isn’t a necessity.
I’m sure it couldn’t be helped, considering stop motion takes a LOT of work, but personally, I pair stop motion with 3d animation, so when a character stops moving completely for a few frames they almost look dead. A great animator once said that when in doubt, make your character blink. That way, if the character does stop moving for a bit, the blink interrupts the pause and it continues to look alive (I did notice though that you did keep characters moving by making them slightly turn in the water, so props there because I really liked that).
One last nitpick, I feel as though the plot was a bit difficult to follow sometimes. It was good overall, but the very beginning seemed to jump around a bit much.
Now that I’m done with the criticisms, let me emphasize the good parts of this movie. Like I said before, the voice acting was amazing. All of the Barraki had voices that suited their character perfectly.
The picture quality was even better this time around, and there were more physical set peices along with the green screen sets.
The revamps you did for some of the characters were good. I thought the Makuta Teridax at the very beginning was rather nice looking. The Mutant Brutaka looked great, too.
“All in all, I really loved this film, and I give it five stars”
-The New York Times
