Hacker Cinema
Castlevania
2017 · TV series · 4 seasons
Created by Warren Ellis
AnimationScience FictionFantasyDrama
A vampire hunter fights to save a besieged city from an army of otherworldly beasts controlled by Dracula himself.
6 positive1 negative1 mixed2 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
Two of those three are over 30 years old and the other is a movie with a $90M budget. I was talking about TV shows.
Though I've heard things like Castlevania are good, haven't seen it though.
Rotoscoping is directly tracing from film frame by frame. Most of the time animators instead use what are called reference key poses. For extremely stylized characters it can be difficult if not impossible to use rotoscoping for complex sequences because the proportions make the motions impossible. Instead specific frames where there's resting motion in the sequence are pulled, and the animators translate the positions of the joints to the unusual silhouette of the character for the key frames. The Castlevania and Masters Of The Universe: Revelation series from Netflix use this quite a bit for realistic characters -- it was heavily used during the Trevor and Death fight and Skelegod versus Savage He-Man fight -- and Rise Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and High Guardian Spice used it for their stylized characters for perspective and fight scenes.
If this technology can instead be used to not only find the key poses but also roughly determine the inbetweens for a heavily stylized character like Rocko Wallaby or Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup then it is extremely useful.
If you have been Star Wars fan since 70s with detail knowledge, then Andor and Obi-Wan were sub-par at best. She-Hulk is quite terrible if you know the comics background. As new age of PC-ness with emphasis on wokeness these days, it is quite good especially the 4th wall breakout in last episode. Fear Street, Escape, Koreans and anime such as Castlevania on Netlifx are very refreshing as compare to westernized-only content on Disney+. By the way, my Disney+ is free from some local popular deal. Mamy I know also on free. Plus multiple subscription to Espn and Hulu. So the number of subscribers are likely heavy double or triple counted.
Animated movies that I often rewatch (in no particular order):
- Spirited Away
- Grave of the Fireflies
- Finding Dory
- Up
- Tokyo Godfathers
- Akira (NOT the English dub, which completely changes the story and dialogue for the worse, and for no good reason)
- Mononoke Hime
- Ghost in the Shell (the original one)
- My Neighbor Totoro
Animated series I'll rewatch:
- Guardian of the Sacred Spirit
- Castlevania
- Futurama
- Archer
- Arcane
- Cowboy Bebop
- Ergo Proxy
- The Dragon Prince
- Hakaba Kitaro
- Star Trek: Lower Decks
Maybe I'm just in some kind of weird minority (I also like modern art and brutalist architecture) but many of the TV shows I've most enjoyed watching over the last year have been Netflix originals. Arcane and Castlevania are both up there with the best western animation ever, The Witcher and Cobra Kai are great pulpy fun while still having compelling characters, and Kate is my favorite action movie.
Netflix is sowing its own demise through shitty content and the worst fucking content discovery system ever.
First Netflix UI is anti-consumer and regularly hides things or makes them difficult/impossible to find. Worst algorithm driven interface after Amazon. It’s truly awful for discovery as you can’t ever be sure what you’re seeing is all that’s available. I fucking hate it.
This wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t grade shows success on their initial views... but they do. So things are hard to discover so I don’t watch them immediately or can’t find them again if I wait a week or two.
I have stopped watching any and all Netflix originals because they will be judiciously cancelled save animated titles because it seems cheap enough for them to produce or something like the Witcher where they hopefully can’t fuck it up so badly it gets canceled before a decent run.
Then again I wait and save the last few episodes shows I really like instead of binging them but that only hurts them more and hastens their cancellations. So then I don’t watch them, this too hastens their cancellations.
So when watching Netflix shows you have two options:
1.) Is the show epically well funded AND staring big name actors from cinema? Okay, maybe won’t be canceled. E.g. the Witcher.
2.) Is the show so cheap to make they’ll do it just because they need to add content? E.g. Castlevania
IMHO, Netflix is willfully creating the rope from which it will hang itself.
> any attempt to "satisfy the marketplace" will always corrupt a translation
I don't know how you're getting this from the article - everything he says about his efforts boils down to trying to change language that sounds flat and lifeless in translation into something that lives and breathes, and I think he's absolutely right to have made that attempt. (even if he misses the mark sometimes, like with the castlevania "what is a man?" bit...)
Living in JP I wind up seeing a lot of movies and TV with one language in the audio and the other in subtitles, and personally, "faithful" translations drive me bonkers with how flat and boring and explanatory they sound.
My pet theory is that it ultimately stems from the source languages being so linguistically different. I once read a book where the translator said in his notes (about Voltaire) "But mostly I've just tried to stay out of his way, for I find that he speaks very good English already", and I've often thought how hard it is to imagine a JP>EN translator feeling the same way.
The article viewpoints are probably right, Netflix and Amazon need a few more hits that people trust.
The Office was a big fallback show and Netflix needs a few of those of their own. Stranger Things probably fits that.
The Witcher might change things for quality on Netflix.
Netflix shows have high production quality in terms of cinematography, lighting, sound, color, sets, on location etc. Writing and big draw actors aren't there just yet, though they have a bunch of that going and started that way with House of Cards. Stranger Things was new actors except a couple like Winona Ryder, the writing was better and it was successful. Maniac and Sabrina are also pretty good in this area. Bojack Horseman has a cult following. Dark is amazing. Black Mirror was a great acquisition. I Am Mother was pretty good and premiering Annihilation was a steal. Russian Doll was excellent. Animation like Death, Love & Robots, Voltron, Castlevania and more are solid. Those are all the model to go for. What is missing in most shows is writing and casting/actors draw to make a staple series that becomes a fallback like the article mentions.
> Consumers turn to a trusted source when they don’t know what to watch on their streaming service
> Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon Prime offer plenty of critically-acclaimed, award-winning content. But the thing is, viewers have to pick which movies and series they’ll watch, and observers say many are getting burned out from all that decision-making.
Now with The Witcher the writing is based on a really solid book series, they have a big name actor Henry Cavill that has read the series and it looks great. It could be their Game of Thrones.
Amazon is also trying this with Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time.
These shows if they are done right, will get rewatched for a long time and draws in the mega fans that are influencers.
Netflix is doing pretty good with stand up comedy, maybe even the leader now. They paid Dave Chappelle and will forever be thanked for that by comedy content consumers.
Netflix and Amazon need some big hits like the coming epics, and they need some good staple shows like the Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99 (Netflix should have bought this), Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Friends, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more. When they have that they equal the content competition that has that trusted good quality. They need a few more of these always watchable fallbacks.
They are both still chasing HBO, HBO is still the top in consistently good content and shows.
Personally I love the competition, some real funding and creator freedom is being unleashed, some are big hits, some are average and some not so good, but I like the amount of content and like the vibe of where Netflix is headed. Their new intro splash where the N goes into color bands is even great, matches their really colorful catalog.
Castlevania backgrounds in season 1 are really ugly, the animation is poor. Season 2 did some good upgrades to backgrounds and the fight scenes where surprisingly good. I think they used the whole budget for that, because I was surprised by how good that looked.
The plot was interesting, I love castlevania, but the quality is still incredibly low from my point of view.
I think of Shingeki no Kyojin, that destroys Castlevania quality by so many levels...
> The comparison with the movie industry is obvious, but what about retaining skill and knowledge, which is vital in the software industry?
Well at the same time the technologies you used to make the game you worked on 2 years ago are probably going to be obsolete in the new game you'd be hired to work on. There's only a few jobs in the game industry where highly specialized, technical people are valued and retained. And there's a ton of talent pool to pick up fresh people from out there who are decent at what they do - probably more than there are jobs for them.
Look at Mercury Steam, they had no experience doing a AAA game (unless you consider Jericho one of them, but I'd say it was rather average in scope), and yet they managed to convince Konami they could do a reboot of Castlevania and they did it pretty well without much prior experience in the similar genre or scope.