Production designer Richard Bridgland dove deep into the world of One Piece to find the inspiration to bring Netflix’s new live-action series to life.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore, a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

You only need to take a casual glance at the new live-action One Piece adaptation to see that Netflix went all out when it came to translating Eiichiro Oda’s vision of a wild world full of pirates to the small screen. A big part of what makes the live-action One Piece work so well are the massive ship and town sets that make the show feel like it’s happening out in the real world rather than on a soundstage.

But when you look a little more closely at many of the places Luffy and his fellow straw hats find themselves in as the series progresses, it becomes clear that One Piece’s creative team poured their hearts and souls into stuffing the show with the finest details you can imagine.

Though Netflix’s One Piece is very much its own beast, production designer Richard Bridgland and showrunners Matt Owens and Steve Maeda knew that the show would live and die by the degree to which viewers were able to see Oda’s world in their unique spin on it. That understanding is reflected most obviously in many of One Piece’s physically large, flashy set pieces involving iconic ships from the manga / anime and characters’ distinctive designs.

But in this new behind-the-scenes production featurette, Bridland delves into how — while you can’t always see it on-screen — almost every single one of One Piece’s sets is chock-full of design details inspired by the ideas in the source material that all work to make this fictional world feel like a thoroughly lived-in place.

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