Character - Submission

Character Design Lessons
Character Sessions - Week 3
Character Sessions - Week 4

Character - "Lester Sr." Turnaround

And, rounding off the trio, Lester Sr. the grumpy piano player situated at the Saloon that Frasier and Snidely have their altercation in. 

Character - Prop - Frasier's Mirror

Below is Frasier's incredibly goofy pocket mirror. As the mirror forms the crux of the short, I thought it should reflect the silliness of the characters and echo the farce of their masculinities. This was the most direct way I could see of doing that. 

Character - "Frasier" Turnaround

And straight up after the Snidely turnaround is the hero, Frasier. 

Character - Frasier - Pose

Following on from my last post, here's the second character designed for the character project, Frasier. 

Turnarounds for both characters to follow as I continue work on the project tonight, as well as finish up final work on the third character. 

Character - Snidely Progression

I think I've reached a place where I'm happy with the design for Snidely. It's changed vastly since the initial stages of the project, whilst also adhering to my vision for the character throughout the entirety of the project. 

Included below is a progression of the character, from thumbnail pose to cleanup, right on through to experimenting with line thickness and finally, painting. 

Character - Frasier development

Quick update on "Frasier", the hero of my character project. I've played around with hand shapes, eyes, noses and ears just to further refine and hone the design. Justin has seen these and suggested I flatten the face a bit as currently it is too squished and pointed upwards. So my task for tonight is to fix that :)

Character OGR - 07/11/2016

Character Sessions - Week 4

Week 4's Character session with Justin saw us tasked with creating 3 characters within a setting. I was assigned the western (there's a theme here...) and went at creating the characters making sure to utilize shape to convey whether a character is a hero/villain or something else. 

I eventually came up with a heroic Native American Sheriff, replete with a mix-up between clothes you would normally associate with a Sheriff and that of a more traditional flavor. I then created the Villain of this world, which became a matriarch-like saloon girl, slightly older, who runs business in the town through her saloon, keeping officials in check with bribery and fear. The third character is that of the "Outlaw" - with a bit of a twist, as it's purely just a young boy, feral from growing up in the wild, still innocent, but definitely scrappy. 

Fantastic Voyage - Antibiotic development

Here's a few developed thumbnails for my antibiotics. I've tried to keep the uniform colours quite traditional and true to life.

I'll be doing a few more of these, and perhaps settling on a "hero" antibiotic, that could perhaps serve as a narrator during the course of the animation. Personally I feel like there should be a few more of these guys with huge mustaches.

I'll have some environment thumbnails to share tonight, so stay tuned for those.

Fantastic Voyage - Bacteria thumbnails 1-9

So, here's a few ideas for what my kaiju-esque bacteria could look like. I myself quite like 2, 5 and 8. And, time permitting, I don't see why I couldn't include a couple of different designs in the final animation, perhaps to show off different adaptations against antibiotics.

I want these things to kind of look benign, almost stupid looking creatures that don't really know what effect they're having, even though the effect is horrendous and destructive. So I've gone with a slightly vacant looking expression on each of them. I like the use of ungainly long limbs, and I feel like it makes them look kind of uncanny, and a little unsettling, but hopefully not too much, what with my chosen audience.

More are coming; currently working on a mood board in order to gauge what kind of colours I'll be using. And I've explored thumbnail #2 a little more, in terms of chronicling its growth as it adapts.

Anyway, to photoshop!

Cheers,

Crouch.

"Ziggy" - Finished Animatic.

Here's the rescored version of my animatic. Got to dash, more work to do. Looking forward to showing it off though, See yáll on the morrow.

Cheers,

Crouch.

"Ziggy" - Animatic

Here's the current animatic for "Ziggy". Really happy with this, image upscaling issues aside.

I don't know if It's a cop out by utilising "Blue Danube" for the score, initially I had put it there as a placeholder to edit to, but increasingly I found that it just worked so well that I couldn't bare to remove it.

Thoughts appreciated.

Cheers,

Crouch.

"Ziggy" - Ziggy's space suit.

And hot on the heels of my last post, here's Ziggy's space suit! 

Getting used to using the Cintiq now. Now I'll be moving onto the environment, hopefully having a portion of the space shuttle worked out by the end of today. 

"Ziggy" - Fuzz Space suit design.

Big news, I got myself a Cintiq. 

And these are the first images I've got from it! 

Yes, Fuzz and Ziggy needed space suits! So here is Fuzz's, replete with a tiny deviation from their usual design - blue stripes down the arms and legs. 

The good news is that I'm finding the new tablet easier to work on. So, Ziggy's suit, The grappling hook and the environments. Big day tomorrow then :) 

Flash - Flirtatious Blimp, Coloured.

So, here's my blimp, coloured, and I've improved the cycle on the animation so it actually flows, I've also embraced the roughness of my initial linework, and Meg seems to like the direction I've taken this.

Next thing to do is colour the cloud in and include some dribble coming out of the blimp's mouth.

"Ziggy" - Waxworks Worker design

So, working up the placeholder characters in my storyboard had proved successful with the other characters, each leading me to something different or modified from what I initially imagined, and I certainly went along this route for the Waxworks Worker. I imagined this kind of greasy teen, not particularly odious looking; instead being this  "living in his Mum's basement, going out partying on the weekend, heavy metal listening" kind of guy. 

So I went down that route, yet as I was drawing him I quickly grew dissatisfied with his design. And into my head popped a scruffy looking round fellow. Cheerful and unassuming. Someone content in minding his own business, kind of just waddling along as he worked. It almost felt as though I was drawing something half remembered, and as he appeared I saw fit to give him a name, which initially he would not have had.

So, here's Steve, the Waxwork guy.

"Ziggy" - Mother, colour comps.

So, all in all I'm really happy with how these have turned out, I feel like I've achieved the glee that the Mother character shows when encountering the Fuzz display. To top that off, I think I've achieved something which I wasn't capable of at the start of this course, which is to draw convincing female characters, and to an extent, draw characters at all.

So, I'm faced with 4 choices. Personally, I really like number 1, and it's how I've imagined this character looking from the start. But having said that, there's merit in the other choices too. Option 2 with the cream jumper is really evocative of the 80's in my mind. And there's something about that red jumper in number 4 too.

Decisions decisions.

Anyway, one more character to plot out after this. The ball is rolling!

"Ziggy" - Mother, character development

To design the boy's mother then...

I began to experiment with what sort of character I wanted the mother to look like during the storyboarding process. And after receiving feedback about it, it became clear that I had to imbue her with more aesthetics from the 80's. 

So, straight off I formed a mental checklist of what that could be and came up with big hair, big jumpers, big glasses and "Mom Jeans". 

The first result (the character on the left) left much to be desired, for I feel like I had created the boy's younger sister instead of his mother. So I tried again, hiding the midriff and straightening the trousers out - as well as getting rid of that sassy pose.

I felt quite happy with the addition of glasses and to a greater extent, the "big hair" - which was mainly inspired by this image. 

So, I played around with the pose again, and presto!...

So, onwards to the colour comps! :)

"Ziggy" - Young Boy, colour comps

So, here are the colour comps I mentioned earlier. I've tried to be in-keeping with colours that recurred within my image reference library. 

Choosing between them is a little tougher this time around, I feel like I'm leaning towards number 1. though. 

Let me know what you think.

Cheers, 

Crouch.