Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-71.17.70.245-20140518032334/@comment-24891101-20140518055337

My opinion on the shift to modeled background characters is mixed. Part of the charm and uniqueness of the first season, for me, was actually the silhouettes. With no one in the background, the focus is entirely on the principals in the scene. Further, the silhouettes give the show a storybook-like feel, where there are illustrations in which the background quickly fades into vague shapes, giving broad strokes of background. I'm sort of thinking pencil sketches or impressionism. Strangely, this idea meshes better with the more subdued backgrounds of this coming season, as shown in PD2, more than the much more vibrant backgrounds of the first.

Of course, there are a number of drawbacks to the silhouettes: in certain contexts it can just look bad (Yang's friends spring to mind), and when completely surrounded, major characters look very out of place. It also makes it trivial to determine important characters in scenes, so we will instantly be able to tell if an important character is introduced (Plus some false alarms. Didn't some people here have wacky theories about the approximately two background characters which had models in 1x15 and 1x16?).

As to my own idea? I think it would be interesting, if rather difficult, to have slightly more detailed silhouettes as a baseline, enough to give them the barest hint of personality, and where there are important characters, to have the nearer NPCs be more detailed, and fade in detail with distance. So crowd scenes would have a bit more character, and major characters would not stick out as much.

I would also like to note that there is something to be said for the starkness of formless silhouettes, especially from an artisitic unity perspective, considering various promotional material makes heavy use thereof.