Week 5
Week Five’s class was an introduction to character design, our first task was taking the character we had worked on last week and making a quick expression sheet of sketches exploring different facial expressions.
I think a few of my expressions look too similar and that I could have exaggerated them more but I found it difficult to maintain Nick’s likeness when more exaggerated expressions require more drastic stretching and distorting of the face’s structure.
Our next task was to quickly draw a front, side or 3/4 view or our character in full. As I had already drawn Nick in full from front view I chose to sketch out a side view.
I found this quite difficult in the time we had in class as I don’t feel very confident with human anatomy and often find it hard to make a character look consistent from different angles, in particular Nick’s face and posture stands out to me here as needing more practise in different angles/poses before I have to animate him.
Our final task in class was to make a character line-up of our front view drawings and present it to the class, giving a quick catch up summary of what we’ve been working on.
Our line-up got a good laugh from the class as did our quick explanation of the story we had planned already. I also wrote out in bullet point form our story so that our re-joining members could catch up. I decided to stay with group 6 as since I came up with most of our plot I’ve started to feel a lot more invested than when I initially joined just feeling confused by the concept.
I also made a quick mood board based off of a Pinterest board I had been compiling of ideas for our cave/dungeon environment as I felt we needed to make our environment more simple than the groups ideas from before I joined which was a combination of both an industrial post apocalyptic world as well as a whimsical fantasy world. Instead my idea, which I made sure the other group members liked as well, was to make the underground world for the animatronics to come from simply be a sewer under the city they were causing havoc in.
I took inspiration for my sewer concept from artwork for old school dungeon games and comics (Bob Maurus, top right. Johnny Ryan, bottom middle right) as well as similar sewer/underground environments from some of my favourite games such as the sewers from Stray (bottom left) and BlightTown from Dark Souls 1 (bottom middle left)