Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Is "Key Art" And Why Is It Important?
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2 Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
KH91
Posts: 6176 |
|
|||
|
Key visual.
What do you feel when you see this? |
||||
|
||||
Mr. Oshawott
 Posts: 6773 |
|
|||
|
^
Seeing this visual of VRAINS has gotten me excited for cyber-surfing! 
|
||||
|
||||
leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
|
|||
|
It's a young man and a ghost getting electrocuted while being chased by a humanoid creature and a dragon with a halo! The humanoid creature is getting ready to slice the ghost in two, and the young man is showing us a brown portal.
I get the idea behind this though: Fast-paced excitement with a cyberspace theme. The card indicates this is a Yu-Gi-Oh! series. |
||||
|
||||
Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9836 Location: Virginia |
|
|||
|
KH91 Wrote:
Disoriented. It is an incoherent confusing mess. |
||||
|
||||
|
jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
 Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
|
|||
It's very old now, but the old CPM releases of Patlabor had no key art. All the good promotional art was owned by Akemi Takada instead of the licensor, so all we were allowed to use were blurry old 35mm sides of screencaps. Those disc covers looked like butt and everybody knew it. Manga Video ended up commissioning new artwork for the movies. ADV's old City Hunter TV discs had no key art. You can tell that some of them are badly traced from screenshots. This is actually pretty common with older shows, since artwork was stored physically back in the day. They'd be sent out to get used for something and just never come back. Anime publishers have had to get really creative. We've scanned old LD covers, old issues of Newtype, composited screenshots... you name it. But sometimes a licensor has no art AND doesn't allow us the freedom to use whatever we find. And that's a real problem. |
||||
|
||||
Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
|
|||
|
I always suspected something like that was the reason behind a lot of the craptastic old DVD and VHS covers back in the day. But credit where it's due, some of them did do well given the resources they had.
|
||||
|
||||
|
Panoptican
Posts: 160 |
|
|||
Oh is that why my Castle of Cagliostro DVD cover looks so bad? It's just a screenshot from the movie. DVD cover: http://imgur.com/a/RSC9S |
||||
|
||||
Cutiebunny
 Posts: 1746 |
|
|||
I've met her a couple times and she does peg me as the type of person that would hang on to their artwork solely because they know how much it would sell for at auction. It's rare, but she's not alone in doing this. Several artists, like Atsuko Nakajima, make it a part of their contract, especially if they work on the OP/ED/character design aspect. In Nakajima's case, she kept all the OP/ED artwork she worked on for Hakuouki.
It was also very common for studios to sell this artwork, meaning that, if something were to be released a decade later, there would be very little, if any, of that original artwork available to use. A perfect example is Madhouse, who, back in the mid-2000s, was facing a serious financial crunch (though I had heard from the seller that it was also because Madhouse did not want Disney to have it as they were, at that time, in talks of having Disney buy a controlling stake). While I have no idea as to how much was sold, I would say that a good chunk of the hankens produced for Cardcaptor Sakura are no longer in Madhouse's possession. This includes all of the artwork used on the DVD covers. I recently noticed that one of the CCS hankens that I own is being used in the newest promotion as a clear file. I'm interested to know if the reason they could only offer it as a CF was because the scan they made back in 2005 is not at a high enough resolution for them to make anything larger. |
||||
|
||||
|
leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
|
|||
|
Well, that explains the low quality of some of the artwork for some of these DVD covers or that they just used a screenshot. I just assumed it was because the English-language people weren't able to contact whoever's responsible for providing artwork or that such people refused to hand them over and not that they didn't exist at all (or that they lost them).
|
||||
|
||||
Hikarunu
 Posts: 950 |
|
|||
|
I always ended up hunting key art on Y****.** because man lovely official art.
|
||||
|
||||
|
jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief
Posts: 1684 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
|
|||
The originals, yes. Artwork would usually be stored and delivered to publishers as photographic chromes (basically like 35mm slides, except much bigger). They'd only make so many of these, and after a few years they'd get lost. |
||||
|
||||
|
Mikeski
Posts: 608 Location: Minneapolis, MN |
|
|||
I feel something is being sold to eight-year-old boys. |
||||
|
||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group