Quote from: SiL on Dec 08, 2018, 03:57:11 AM
I'd say they're as uninspired as anything Black and Dekker did. Cutting Predator roles along racial and gender lines is just... Kinda lame.
It makes them seem a little too "human".
Not even that, it's too "sterile". Even humans (generally) don't cut roles along racial and gender lines, at the risk of seeming, you know, racist or sexist.
I mean yeah there's a place in sci-fi for interesting stories about one's role in society and whether one is "born" to be in a certain role, but I don't think "Predator culture" is the place for it.
That said,
re: the design concepts, I dig some of the designs early in the video with the dreadlocks "bundled" up and tied back behind the head, it re-frames the shape of the Predator head in an interesting way without full-on redesigning it (although the particular artwork felt a little "stylized").
The "scale plating" idea at 1:16 reminds me of the armor from 'AvP', especially the bit running down the middle of the chest and abdomen. Putting scale plates on the dreadlocks themselves is a novel idea, though. And the one at 1:21 feels like Berserker's armor from 'Predators', with the straps and cloth bands.
The one at 1:38 feels very "low-tech Prometheus" - the lower-abdomen ribbing and the ridges going up the neck remind me of the Engineer from the end of the movie, but then it's got cloth sleeves and whatnot.
Also while this might have just been because they weren't the focus, I like how the naked Predator body designs don't have anything resembling human genitalia.
I'm serious - I remember an idea tossed around that "male" and "female" Predators would be visually indistinguishable, and that any of the Predators in any of the movies could conceivably be male or female and the audience would have no idea. I always thought that was a neat approach.
I agree with SiL that the face concepts feel a little thin and squished, but I think part of that is the perspective. The faces look too "flat", but almost all of the designs are from straight-on. If they had some accompanying profile or quarter-profile drawings, I might find them more appealing - the designs didn't really start to fall into place for me until the 3D renders at 5:30
On one hand I'm not real big on the large, pronounced ridges going down the center of the top of the head, but on the flip side, shaking up the shape of the head in radical ways goes a pretty long way towards conveying "these are individuals" more than just changing their colors.
And in the BTS clips of filming the Emissary Predators, some of the more pronounced design features from the artwork feel a lot less extreme and it comes together a bit better.