Life of Lewa-Behind the scenes (How It Began)

Life of Lewa- Behind the scenes

How It Began

          The Life of Lewa series is a fan fiction role play which revolves around the well

 known Bionicle hero, Toa Lewa.

          This series is a tale of love, family, heart break, happiness and the overall adventure of life lived through Lewa's eyes.

          To my slight embarrassment, it's basically a role play series that quickly turned into a Bionicle soap opera.

             It all started on Thurs., Jan. 28, 2010; when I introduced Bionicle to a new friend, in attempt to warm her up to Bionicle role play, the sort I call animated still life rp.

My friend was entirely new to Bionicle, but I was convinced she would like it, and I was right. Her personality reminded me of Lewa, so I handed her that character, and encouraged her to act him while I played other figurines. Her reaction was classic, the first thing she did was slightly grimace and shrug at the lime green figure handed to her. She agreed to play along, but didn't much like the color green..her reasons, because it clashed with her complexion. I convinced her that the character was perfect for her to act, and explained that her personality fit the role well. This warmed her up to trying, and we started playing the very first episode, now called, “The encounter”.

           When my friend first started playing Lewa in “The Encounter”, she was unaware of the character's qualities, and used a Southern accent for his voice. This made me laugh; and I stopped her before Lewa was turned into a big joke, and explained he was meant to be more Irish in quality, then showed her the scenes with Lewa from Bionicle the Mask of Light movie. She caught on to his character and accent better after that, and soon she started to love acting Lewa, forgetting all about her taste for green.

            After the first episode, I found my friend was becoming hooked to the Bionicle series, and toys; loving every moment of play time we could get for rp.

            From that day onward, continuing for nearly seven months; starting from from Jan. 28, 2010 till July 25, 2010, me and my friend acted out episodes for Life of Lewa in the animated still life style. (Animated still life is just play time with plastic figurines).

I didn't expect our role play to turn into a story, but somehow it did. I was expecting each episode to be random, and short lived; in fact, the first episode acted was a test run and warm up rp session to see if my friend would even like it.

Once I knew she liked it, we continued role play, and she stuck to using Lewa as her main character.

The more we played, the more apparent it became that this story was about Lewa, whom we liked putting through crazy adventures and mind twisting scenarios. Lewa was never left out of any episode, and he became my friends iconic character, while I acted pretty much everyone else (and still do).

           Soon we found ourselves planning and creating complex ideas and story concepts for our unnamed rp at the time, and each episode somehow fed into itself and linked on like a chain to each episode before it. It was no longer running on random; even what at first seemed random somehow became a new puzzle piece that fit on to more complex scenarios.

The rp sequence in animated still life form was very exiting. Me and my friend made phone calls and spoke about new ideas, stayed up late acting and scheming during sleep overs, exchanged name and character concepts, and had full episode idea discussions during long drives to and from each others homes during the weekends.

           Soon the story formed into something extravagant and addicting, I will confess. It was an art inspiring story that somehow became enchanting to our creativity. I found myself making art, and objects pertaining to this role play story; and all I could ever think about is what we would invent next in the rp.

          After July 25, 2010 we had to change rp methods. A great many episodes were played out in only half a year, and by the time July came around the story had become an apparent story, and not just a random rp sequence.

         We had to change acting methods due to a few life changes; but this didn't stop us from continuing our play. We started up rp in a new form I came to call vocal rp (voice acting of characters online through video and microphone). We continued the adventure through technology; something that took me awhile to get use to; and continued the Life of Lewa series from there.

For the next year and a half we carried out rp for LoL, never really caring about the episodes already played, just looking forward to acting the next new episode. We didn't actually record episodes, because it was an embarrassment at the time, and we feared that if it landed into the wrong bunch of readers, we would be in for trouble.

         Then it happened, sometime near the first week in December 2011, the Life of Lewa series was put on hold for the next two years.

During this time I never stopped dreaming of concepts and new ideas, and held on to the LoL story, even though it appeared to be retired. It's during this two year break that I realized this rp had become something great, something magical, something oddly captivating and heart breaking all at once. Then it came to me, I realized it was time to step out of the dark, and push this series into the light; it needed a name, it needed to be written.

         This is when I started calling it Life of Lewa. The name seemed perfectly fitting for the apparent theme of the rp, and holds a double meaning. In abbreviation it's seen as LoL; we know that lol commonly means laugh out loud. Then I thought, what is Life of Lewa like...? It's comedic in many ways, but serious in others. What is Lewa like in many cases, even in canon Bionicle story line? He comes across as the passionate joker, right? With this in mind, Life of Lewa is a series that may cause you to laugh out loud in some ways, but does in fact hold it's serious qualities; thus the name Life of Lewa (LoL) was formed.

        I started kicking myself for not recording the episodes that were played over time; now that I was ready to write LoL, I found that many of the episodes had been lost from memory through the years. However, I didn't let this stop me. I realized there would be a lot of work involved to making this story a reality for reading, and regardless of not having full memory of most the episodes, I still have enough memory of main episodes to start it back up.

        I look at LoL as a pile of paper work; some pages were unfinished drafts, other pages were main story clips, and some pages were connector scenes. The main story clips remained in the folder, and unfinished drafts could always be tweaked and recreated; however, some of the main ideas and connector episodes were lost in the wind. Some of them blew away, and others got wet and blurred, to put it metaphorically.

        I realized that the Life of Lewa series would have to be recreated and reacted based off what few memories I have of main episodes played, and blurry scenes that still exist in my head.

        In order to make this possible, I knew I needed to get back in touch with the actress of main character, and secondary director of the LoL series. It wouldn't be the same without some outside help. But first, I decided to write the first chapter to introduce the idea to her, so I sat down and wrote “The Encounter” based off the main memories of first episode played. I did of course have to tweak things and add in stuff that I know didn't exist in the episode during its started days.

        I looked at writing Life of Lewa as a wonderful new start and take on the series. Though most the original episodes have been forgotten, anything new or added to base episodes still in memory will no doubt be better because I have all the time needed to think out the episodes and work on more complex ideas that will tie with each other more smoothly.

How Life of Lewa is formed today

After introducing the idea of writing LoL into a readable story for many to enjoy, and sharing the first written episode with my friend; she gladly agreed with the idea of starting back up the rp so it could be written.

Here's how it works: Me and my friend act over camera and play out each episode of the story. During our voice acting, I record the conversation, which I then listen to after we end call. I then type down the words we acted, and work off a draft, which is then made into an episode chapter. This is the reason dialogue can get a bit crazy in the written story; but has lots of life to it, since it's written off winged acting. I tweak parts here and there to help it flow better, but most of what you read is word for word dialogue from voice acted sequences done on the fly.

Since a large majority of original played story chapters have been forgotten, we're partially starting from scratch on making the story, while working off remembered sequences.

I write down what I can remember of certain episodes, and then compile them and see what should come next. It's sort of like filling in the blanks; some of the sentence is already written, but it needs words in between to help make it complete.

Most of what you read in the Life of Lewa series is rethought, and remade. What happens in each episode is going to be different than it was when first played as an rp episode from the past; but in many ways you could say that's a good thing; it no doubt is better rethought than it was when first acted.

Each episode is acted from start to finish. On the occasion I may write parts that were never acted between me and secondary director, mostly in places like touch up scenes and connector episodes; but there may also be some episodes purely made on my own.

I will also give fair warning, LoL is comedic in many respects, but it can also be quite creepy. Some episodes may even be rated PG/PG13 for some violence and adult themes.

The LoL series is still forming, which means that's it's natural to expect each chapter shared will likely be updated in the future if need be. This simply means, nothing in the series is absolutely permanent at this time.