Using Monument Valley as a starting point, I created this environment concept. The two dots around the centre are our two main bugs who will be facing off.
To try and work around the ‘no legs’ aspect we have to incorporate into our characters, I’d thought about covering them up as much as I could. In the initial character concepts I had almost done that with the poncho bug, and I believe Liam had taken that into 3D and covered the legs up completely. Here though I’d come up with the idea of a too-big belt that would hang low and cover the legs.
As a group we had discussed the film ‘Rango’ (2011) as a good starting point for our characters. With the main antagonist in that film being a rattlesnake with a gatling gun for a rattle using a baby snake for our own story was mentioned. Feeling that was too on the nose however we’d also thought about a worm as a character somewhere so there would be one character for definite with no legs. In the above image the worm is just a generic design that I had thought could work for one of the two witnesses that are going to be watching the action unfold in front of them.
We assigned characters for each group member to work on in a group call, and I chose the antagonist. Influenced by Rango, I decided to use an earthworm for this character.
Above: initial sketches for my antagonist
In these sketches I took an idea from my first character concepts where the brim of the hat acts as eyebrows to make the character’s expression more menacing where it comes to a point. The worm’s protrusion would also look a little like a scarf or bandana around an outlaw’s neck.
At this point our short is called “The Good, The Bad, and The Bugly”