Back From Billund

I'm home again, finally, after two weeks spent largely on the road!

It started with a few days in Saratoga Springs, NY, for LEGO Club meetings. Then after being home a couple days, it was off to Billund for BIONICLE story meetings. A few notes from the trip --

-- Billund is becoming the Orlando of Denmark. The hotels were packed, the airport was packed, and I had to stay with BIONICLE web producer Leah Weston Kaae and her family because there were no hotel rooms (and thanks to her for the hospitality). There are evidently plans to build a water park there now to go along with LEGOLAND.

-- The meetings went great. We totally mapped out 2009-2011 and everyone from the franchise manager on down was very happy with what we came up with. Enormous thanks to Christian from Advance, our creative agency, and Christoffer, our lead set designer, who contributed a lot of terrific ideas to the storyline. This past year has seen the story team working AS a team more than I think any other time in the history of BIONICLE. Lena and Jesper did their usual great job of keeping us on task, and Camilla let us know when we were going down paths that were too confusing or required too much knowledge of back story.

I won't say this was the most intense meeting we have ever had -- there wasn't any fighting, for one thing -- but it may have been the most productive. Over two days, we nailed three full years of story, including set ideas, settings, subtext, everything. I was fried by the end of it. The trip there and back was exhausting, but I have to say, it is really a great experience to be in a room with such creative people and just come up with ideas. When it's working, things flow; and when things stop flowing (as they did during one of our 2010 discussions), then you know you are on the wrong road and it's time to turn around and go back to the start.

-- Next step is I have to write up a summary of what we came up with for our next series of meetings in August, which are scheduled for four days mid-month.

-- Got to see the (almost) final 2008 summer sets. One thing to note is 2008 will see the return of some more advanced and complex builds, something BZPers have been asking for. I can't say anything beyond that, other than the sets are very impressive and definitely on my shopping list for next year.

-- There was a lot of other big news from the meeting, some you will hear about soon and some that has to wait a while. But all of it was good.

-- Greg