Creeps from the Deep: Pridak

A huge collab reimagining the Bionicle sets of 2007! Pridak went through quite a lot of revisions as I wasn't quite able to settle on a design in my head. It all started with a head design incorporating the Pridak blades and some red teeth to mimic the original set's edgy red "colouring". I quickly scrapped it because of the lack of shark-like qualities and overall size.

I made some attempts to upscale the original Pridak head mould but this turned out really goofy looking and I scrapped that quickly too.

The head I settled on fit the bill perfectly, at least for me personally. It resembled a shark, had some mechanical details and on the whole looked quite clean and menacing.

From there, I haphazardly constructed a really fragile body and struggled my way through some legs that I ended up quite happy with. A lot of the techniques and simple connections I normally rely on were not holding up at all with the large weight and long limbs.

I actually considered the build done at this point. However, after staring at the finished photo for a few days I wasn't really satisfied with how flimsy it was and the way that it was posed so statically. Also, everybody else in the collab was starting to show some of the killer stuff they had in the works and I felt pretty driven to match that as well. I decided to rework the whole body and work on strengthening the joints to make the whole build more animalistic and dynamic. I settled on a pose right from the start and worked on building up the proportions in a way that fit the pose I had in mind.

Ari did amazing work on all the edits in the collab. His work makes all the builds pop and realy unifies all the diverse builds under a single theme. It also plays so well into the nostalgia of the original set boxart and graphics. Huge kudos to him for putting in that much work for so many pictures! Please check out all the other builds in the gallery, there's some great standouts and some really unique takes on the original sets.

Here's the Flickr gallery with all the rest of the amazing builds!