2025.08.21

bionicle on 35mm

The story of legos bionicle 2

In June, my friend Jaina spotted a couple of interesting e-bay listings. ‘Legos Bionicle 2’ 30-second trailers on 35mm film. There were two, one in Scope format (ultra-widescreen), and another in Flat (about 16:9, the standard ratio you see a lot outside of theatrical film production).

‘Legos Bionicle 2’ would be Legends of Metru Nui, right? According to the film’s producers it was made in HD, despite only ever being released in SD. So there was a chance… thirty seconds of high definition lomn footage?

I went for the Flat version, since the bionicle movies are 16:9 and a Scope print would likely just be cutting visual information off the top and bottom. I felt curious and mildly optimistic, but not terribly excited – 30 seconds from over an hour of runtime would be better than nothing, but it’d also feel so incomplete, you know? Why can’t someone put an inexplicable full copy of the movie on 35mm online for me to buy for $9.99…

Now. I do not have a device for scanning 35mm and, to my great pain, I cannot justify spending $800+ on specialized equipment for 30 seconds of bionicle footage. Instead, I turned to Kineko Video, a group I know and trust for their extensive efforts digitizing old anime. They do professional, high quality work and come from a hobbyist background with a passion for what they do. Even though bionicles are outside their standard wheelhouse, they just felt like the right people for the job. I’m glad they were willing to take this on!

While I was corresponding with them about the film and mailing it over for scanning, they commented on how 30 seconds is hardly a trailer. This got me thinking for the first time about how we don’t really have any Legends of Metru Nui trailers of that length – outside of TV commercials. So was this gonna be one of those? Or some new cut, made just for theater preshows?

Then I got the preview back from Kineko. Oh! THAT kind of 2. The 2 thousand and 2.

I got a lot more excited about this!!!! Like, this is the complete ad. In HD. The best we’d had before now was a lossy export at 800x341. But there was a catch… everything was washed out and redder than it should be.

I guess this is the kind of stuff they’re doing over at the criterion collection offices all day

This film arrived to me without a plastic core, and it had resultantly gotten kinda squished flatways. A good sign that it hadn’t been kept in incredible storage conditions, if the colors alone weren’t enough of a tell. Kineko kindly added a core and some leading blank film to better protect the reel before sending it back to me, but I still had to contest with the degraded colors.

Luckily (?) I had been obsessing over color reproduction a few months ago when I scanned Kidnappers from Swamp Planet, so I had a bit of a base of knowledge to work with. I split the scan up by shot and manually adjusted the color and luma levels, using the 800x341 digital copy as my reference for how everything ‘should’ look.

I had to make some compromises. The film is sooooo reddened that i had to choose sometimes between allowing a very slight reddish tinge to remain, or over-correcting with green and greenifying the Tahnok/Tahu as a result. In general, I chose to make the characters more 'right' than the background. The blues of the krana/Tahnok eyes are Kind of Just Fucked in the scenes where they're overwhelmed by the green bg and red Tahnok. I couldn’t bring them into full depth of deep blue without it blowing out the color in the surrounding shot. Still, I worked to ensure they were still appreciably blue.

The results are pretty satisfactory, imo. Here are some comparisons:

The trade-off to the imperfect colors is the unprecedented resolution, but how HD is this actually? you tube claims the upload is 4K, but that’s completely false. If you download the vid from bmp you can see that the actual dimensions of the end product are 3524x1496. That’s like, 500 pixels off from 4000!! It doesn’t count!!! The film WAS scanned in 4K, but the active area is smaller.

Then there’s the question of how high the res actually was on the digital source this would have been captured to film from. I would guess there are probably techniques out there to reverse engineer a pretty decent estimate? But that’s not my area of expertise. The card at the start of the reel says it is ‘720x’, but I’m not sure that would directly equate to 720 pixels. I would sooner guess that it is describing an aspect of how the film was captured – but internet searches for ‘720x 35mm’ aren’t turning up useful info for a gal with very little knowledge about film tech (who is me im the gal).

Another thing that has left me a little baffled is the aspect ratio of the film. It’s ‘ultrawide’ or like, the Scope format, which was the label on the film I didn’t choose to buy??? I’m not sure why the one I got was labeled Flat. But ultrawide IS correct for this Bohrok commercial so like. whatever. There’s actually a slight bit of visual info letterboxed off the top and bottom on my copy, to make it even more ultrawide, so I really don’t know what’s going on there.

In conclusion: the level of detail present in this commercial is (probably) somewhere between 1280 pixels in width and 3524 pixels in width. probably. You can definitely see texture on stuff like the krana much better than ever before.

Every copy of bionicle: bohrok: the aspirational movie trailer is personalized

My final note before I leap, bugstyle, into an enriching looking patch of wildflowers. There are some small differences between the digital and film versions of this ad that go beyond the natural discrepancies of the mediums. In one or two shots, some adjustments have been made to the background smoke. The film version has a shorter crossfade and the end, plus copyright text with the lego logo.

And in the shot where Tahu gets krana’d, the digital version adds a glow to his eyes.

I’m really happy I was able to bring something like this to the internet. It’s a hell of a collector’s piece, too :3 Gonna need to find a lil plastic case it’ll fit in nicely...