Yep yep. In my experience costume designers are pretty thoughtful regarding function, so these choices always mystify me. Armor, probably more than any other wearable, has evolved across cultures in specific ways to provide very necessary, obvious functions, which this design seems to ignore completely.
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Anime is doing just fine in the Japanese domestic market and Asia. And as a niche market elsewhere. But “fine” in that regard is on the order of a typical network TV show at peak. You don’t tend to see global hits on the order of Game of Thrones or large blockbusters. The sort of thing that justifies the expense of really good animation. Counter to the impression people seem to get from what gets exported. The bulk of Anime is targeted at kids and teens, produced for television, and uses the same cost saving tricks and Korean sub contractors as Western animation to keep costs down. Really Anime is doing about as well as American animation currently is, since we’ve had a little revolution in American television animation going on for a while now.
It kind of sits almost exactly where American animation does, discounting the large scale family tent poles lil Frozen. If you can keep costs low, you can turn a profit by targeting a healthy niche market, or domestically on TV. Kids and teens especially are a good target market. Its profitable but you need to keep it cheap. Even that Castlevania show as well carried off as it is. Took a long time to make, has a pretty short episode run, and uses the same cost saving approaches and subcontractors. And where there is quite a bit of animation targeted at older people in the US the quality of the animation is often not great or compromised, and in cases like DC and Marvel’s in house animated movies the writing is often pretty shit.
Its very much a situation of what you put in dictating what you have to get out. If you pay up for an expensive license, animation is a riskier way to see a return on that. Good animation would be neccisary to help over come that, but good animation costs so much and takes so long it can’t mitigate that risk.
That’s a big reason CG has taken over almost entirely in features, good CG is expensive. But not nearly as expensive and time consuming as good traditional animation. Particularly anything hand drawn. So its a better financial bet.
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So somebody at Netflix thinks you can make something that looks like armor by gluing gummi worms to canvas and spray-painting it. I have never even looked at anything connected to “Witcher” and even I recognize this as a pathethic, childish travesty.
And by that I presume you mean bringing on Warren Ellis.
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I agree, and hope we see a new wave of animated work in the near future.
I’ve particularly thought that the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust would be an ideal source material for animation. That format would be able to walk the tightrope over the uncanny valley without losing the key “House” traits that are central to everything from the cyclical political ascendance to the underlying science fiction basis of the world-building.
I probably think that because my mental image of the Dragearans has always been influenced by 1990’s anime, all widows-peaks and cheekbones.
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On the bright side, we’ll be seeing more TV work from Ellis. He’s deciding this entire year to several different visual projects.
Pointed stick? Pointed stick?
Feeling all high and mighty, are we?!?
Bananas not good enough for you, are they?
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What if your assailant’s got a basket of raspberries? Or peaches?
Or even a devilishly sharp slice of mango?
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VFX was the first thought I had when I saw the set photo. That dorky “armor” looks like it was created as a framework for later vfx work.
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That’s not generally what something designed to have effects layered on it looks like. All that figuring and detail is gonna catch light creating a high contrast pattern across the surface. And color used is situational, black is used but typically for things you’re going to completely mask out. Which would make layering CG over the top more difficult than it needs to be. There’s a reason why mocap suits are skin tight unitards with bright marks at specific points.
You can layer cg on pretty much anything these days. But that’s not the surface you’d choose if you were planning on it.
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That would work.
The biggest problem with it is that there is no conceivable way to replicate that in the “book universe” without first inventing duct tape. Because it looks like some shitty budget cosplay made out of duct tape and its wilted in the heat.
The time is supposed to be an alternative medieval setting. Between Game of Thrones and shows like and the many medieval period movies there has got to be literally warehouses chock full of armour to hire.
A Gambeson (arming jacket) is actually a thing, and they could be waterproof. If you needed to sneak around anywhere that is what you’d wear. Not this…garbage that does not bear any resemblance to any armour ever made.
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Reminds me of a story of old from the video game world;
It was the early 1990s and Mark Hamill was offered a role in the 3rd Wing Commander PC game - the first one to use live-action cut scenes (remember those). The talk was they couldn’t pay him his asking rate so, knowing what he knew about Star Wars profiteering, he agreed to work for half his rate BUT with ‘real points’ (aka gross profit percentage) on the backend.
And if anyone knows their gaming history, WC3 was huge (with 2 followups). Needless to say, young Skywalker did pretty well for himself in the video game world of the early-mid 90s.
Lesson is, always take gross-points when you can.
(side-note; net-points are a scam - don’t take those - you’ll get nothing)
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It looks like an attempt at a tooled leather of some sort. But its not executed well, and makes little sense functionally. Best I can figure they’re attempting to replicate some of the textured and patterned fabrics used at the time. Looks more like chronicles of Riddick scifi evil guy costuming than anything else.
“Huge” for PC games at the time meant “sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and made a couple million bucks”. Apparently WC3 sold about 700k copies over the course of its broad availability. I’m sure he made a decent rate off the work, higher than his regular rate at the time. Which was not good, Hamill was mostly doing incredibly low budget direct to video work at the time. And his voice acting career hadn’t truly taken off.
= WC3 sold $12-million the first day – from a M.Hamill quote
= And did about $31.5-mill overall – per your number 700,000 x $45bucks(?)
(I don’t really remember what games sold for back then)
Then there was WC4 and WC:P
And Hamill was getting gross-points (‘real-points’) so what it “made” (aka net) isn’t relevant to his payout because he got money off every sale, not just off of what was considered profit.
Sure, he didn’t make Harrison Ford money but I bet he made upwards of a couple million bucks when all was said and done - and that’s 1990s millions. Not bad for someone who’s career had ‘stalled.’
It can be hard to find sales number for older games. Especially something that isn’t consistently in print.
700,000 copies Total, 500,000 on PC. It doesn’t specify but I’m betting that’s not a for all time number. But during its initial in print period. Which would streatch over a few years.
At the time PC games would be about $65 at release. After a couple months they’d drop to $45, then $35, then live at in the $20 range. Before moving to budget bins for whatever the hell. Successful games like Wing Commander wouldn’t go to the budget bin, they’d just sort of hang at at $35 for a few years before going out of pint. Or getting repackaged in a box set with the rest of the series at around that price point.
So if that $31 mill racked up on the same period of release, it was likely over the course of a few years. But “overall” could indicate since release so it could be longer. How much Hamill got would be down to how many “points” he was getting. If it was 1% your talking $3.1m that’s a healthy amount of money. But how much that looks like in terms of income depends on how it was spread out. It would have been heavily front loaded.
Im not saying that wasn’t a savvy decision and it didn’t make him more than royalties and his few would. But in all likelihood it wasn’t a live off Wing Commander for the rest of your life situation. It didn’t make Hamill rich. Start Wars was that sort of thing. Even people who were barely in the thing could (and to a lesser extent still can) make a nice middle class living off the royalties and signing autographs at the convention. And Hamill stared in the damn thing. Every time they sell a figure or a book with his face on it he gets a royalty, every time they show it on TV. And at this point in time the Special Editions were about to come out.
I never got the impression that Hamill’s struggles were financial. He’s a smart guy, he was already more of a family man than a young Hollywood piss it away type when Star Wars hit. And that shit paid steady income for decades. It was more of a type casting problem. Even as the OT was coming out he had difficulty getting the sort of work he wanted because of type casting and fears that people wouldn’t be able to see anything but Luke Skywalker up on screen. And after his motorcycle accident that became even harder. Its less that his career stalled as never took off, except that he was in Star Wars. Apparently his turn to voice acting was more about wanting to work, and a long term interest in the subject than need.
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