Design

So I am done with my first term at VFS. Holy cow were the last few days super busy!  I spent about 20-22hrs a day at school with only 2-4 hrs of sleep the last week and a half. My body pretty much hated me during that time.  My last day was Wednesday, so I spent all of yesterday recovering and now I'm back to update you guys on what I have been up to.  But since I have quite a bit to show you I will break it up into a couple entries so you guys don't have to read so much in one go.  Today I will show you the work I did in my Design course. Later I will show you what I did in animation and last what I did for my final Still Life project (I am saving that for last because I think it is the most impressive).

So to begin, my Design class was about learning the process that the art department of any production goes through to visualize and design concepts for their project.  The first step is getting the script (or whatever the source material is for the production).  The class was divided into 6 teams, each of us getting a one page script about a girl (Beatrice) and her talking friend cat (Biggles). Each of us got a different part of the story, meaning different interactions and scenarios (i.e. tea party, fort building, dress-up, etc.).  My script was about the two finding a chest under the floor boards where they find an old picture of a man (Lord Bigglesworth) that resembles the cat. They then try to solve the mystery of why they look the same (the instructors never actually solved this mystery within the scripts so I was a bit bummed that it was never resolved).

Once we got the script we did research on the era this thing was supposed to take place (Victorian Era - or at least Victorian influenced). Research is the most important part of the production process. Even if you don't use everything that you researched, you will have an understanding of how it really is/works and your work will reflect it.

Within my group I was given the role as lead character concept artist. Since my team found out that I can draw they made me in charge of creating the concepts of the characters.  The first step was just playing with different shapes, sizes and proportions. This is what I came up with.

From here my team decided what shapes of bodies they liked best - we decided on something like the last Beatrice and something like the first Biggles.  These drawings also helped us decide that we didn't want Biggles to be walking around on two legs like in my final 3 drawings and that he was going to act more like a real cat.

Below is the first few sketches of Beatrice and Biggles.  I drew them in different styles (and there are a ton more drawings that I didn't include). The best thing to do in the concept stage is drawing as much as possible. Even things that you know won't work. Because once you know what doesn't work, you can focus on what does. At the bottom you will see some of my concept for Lord Bigglesworth as well. Also, the quality of these drawings aren't the best because I tried to keep them as rough sketches. It is not wise to spend too much time drawing perfect drawings at the beginning of this process because most of it will be thrown out and you need to work fast and have many different iterations of each character/prop/environment etc.

So as you can see some of those cats look horrifying.  But that was me playing around with different shapes and I knew that they didn't work at all. So I kept closer to the first design in the second row with more of a circular head. Also, the cat's mouth/whiskers mimic Lord Bigglesworth mustache.  So I kept working at the design of the cat and got more concrete with what I wanted it to look like.

As you can see the design for Beatrice also drastically changed as there is an updated version of her in this picture.  I wasn't too happy with what I had earlier (although my team was) and decided to have another go at her. That is what I came up with and I drew her next to the cat so you can see the comparison of size. You may have also noticed that the cat has a top hat, monocle, and bow-tie because in the script he wears them after they have a dress up session.  I showed this to my instructors and they gave me feedback saying that they liked my Beatrice but the cat didn't look like he belonged in the same world. He had too much detail in terms of the way his body is angular and pointy. They told me that a more rounded character would match better. So I drew him over.

This Biggles is a bit more rounded and I really liked the way he was coming out.  So the next step was to draw the two characters in different poses. This is to give a better idea about the personalities.

First Beatrice.

Then Biggles.

Then Biggles next to a finalized concept for Lord Bigglesworth

And then Biggles and Beatrice interacting with each other.

On the side of the last one you can see I started playing with colors. Giving them a more finalized look of how I thought they should look like.  However, the name of the game is iterations. So what I did next was show Beatrice's final design next to Biggles' final design playing with size and color.

I am not sure which one my team ended liking most. I think we were leaning towards the redhead Beatrice, with the Biggles next to her but in the size of the first (bigger) Biggles.

When we presented our concepts to the class and instructors at the end of the term, the instructors told me that they really liked my Beatrice and Biggles. They said they could see the two of them being in an actual cartoon. I was really happy to hear them say that.  So yeah that's what I did in that class. Let me know what you guys think.