Initial Ideas
When starting this project I knew I wanted to focus on Concept Art/ Visual Development but I struggled to come up with an idea. After thinking it over for a while I eventually landed on making it a seasonal project. I really love Halloween so I decided to create a story of kids getting trapped in a haunted forest.
—Pitch Presentation—
For the first week of class we were tasked with creating a pitch presentation of our idea and what we wanted to achieve by the end of the six week period. We also created a production schedule to get a better gauge of how achievable our goals were. Once I received feedback on my pitch I was good to start developing my ideas further, watch a few more videos on concept art and begin drawing up my ideas.
Scheduling
When it came down to my production schedule I mostly followed my gantt chart that I had on my pitch presentation but I found that it was very vague which was causing me to move at a slower pace than I intended to, so after a workshop by Sarah that focused on Illustration, PSD and AE with an in depth coverage of what to include in a character portfolio I decided to take a step back and create a more detailed schedule of everything I wanted to achieve in this project. After creating this new schedule and to-do list I was able to get a better idea of what I needed to do and how long I had to do each task.
Story
—Audience, Animation Style & Synopsis—
I wanted my idea to be turned into a children’s show aimed at 6-12 years olds using 2D puppetry animation. I knew I wanted the story to continue throughout the series so I came up with a simple plot.
Characters Concepts – Kids
—References—
To begin the designs for the children I looked up as many children’s costumes I could find.
—Initial Ideas—
When starting this project I wanted to create three designs of kids in various costumes. I created a list of all the Halloween costumes I could think of.
To make the ideas more interesting I decided to merge two costumes into one to create some initial designs for the kids.
I wanted to experiment with silhouettes and their costume designs as well as portray three types of characters; the daredevil, the scaredy cat and the friendly one. I feel that a vampire witch gives the impression of a mischievous, experimental and adventurous person whereas a Frankenstein ghost gives the impression of a strong, level headed but invisible and scared character who likes to be out of the spotlight. A clown pumpkin suggests that the character is a fun loving, creative person that always has a smile on their face. When these combinations are paired with some shape language it should really push what these characters will be like just by looking at them.
I started out by creating some silhouettes of what some of the costumes would look like before drawing over them to add some details. I really like some of the elements of each costume design which I will later combine to further experiment with the costumes.
—Bodies and Faces—
Next I experimented with different body shapes and made a short list of the features I liked, then played around with different proportions and heights. The final proportions are a bit more teenage looking so I shortened them a bit later.
Next I experimented with some different facial features and hair styles for each character. I liked the hair of 1 and the face of 4 for Vernon (the triangle head) as it gives him a smug and mischievous look but still has a bit of softness which is something I want to hint at in his design. The messier hair gives him this wild, reckless look that hints at his adventures personality.
For the second character, Franklin (the square head), I really like the look of the seventh face as the glasses give the impression that he is smart and the mouth shows that he is the nervous type. The neat hair also implies that he is organised and likes things to be manageable and in a certain way.
Finally, for Clementine (the circle head), I really like the hair of nine and the makeup and face of twelve. The wide, poofy hair makes her look soft and approachable while the triangle makeup hints at her more playful, mischievous side.
—Costumes—
After figuring out the proportions of each character, I moved onto finalising their costume designs. Taking different elements from my earlier tests, I created some more combinations of the possible costumes before creating the final costume designs for each character.
For Vernon, I really like the look of the vampire cape and the witch hat as it makes it easy to tell what combination of costumes he is wearing as well as adding the sharpness to his design which shows his more daredevil, adventurous side. This iteration of Vernon has stitches and a patch on his knee to show his recklessness but I later change it to just be a band aid on his cheek to make his costume more simple and to not copy the patches and stitches on Franklin’s costume.
For Franklin, I knew I wanted to maintain his blocky, stable shape with more form-fitted silhouettes but also wanted to give some of his costume a little bit of flowiness to imply that he likes to be quiet and go unnoticed. I also wanted to give him a hood so that he can curl in on himself and hide when he becomes too scared.
For Clementine, I really wanted to give her a cute pumpkin leaf hat or a beret with leaves but with the pumpkin skirt it left very few spots for any of the clown elements so I had to scrap the hat for a more clown-like cone. I made sure to give her a lot of very round, soft shapes to further push her approachable, huggable nature.
Characters Concepts – Ghosts
—References—
Before designing the ghosts I looked up a variety of different types of ghosts from costumes to ghosts featured in different media.
—Initial Ideas—
When designing the ghosts I wasn’t too sure of what proportions I wanted to go for; humanoid, bed sheet or tear drop shaped so I initially sketched out a whole bunch of different silhouettes before going in to add some more details. I really liked the more tear shaped designs so I took those designs and some of the other elements I liked and experimented further.
I really like the idea of modifying the tear drop shape to be more spikey and on some designs I made them more snake-like with longer twisting tails which implies their dangerousness and unpredictability when they are encountered.
—Faces—
After figuring out how I wanted the body of the ghosts to look I played around with some different eyes and mouths. The ones with teeth like three and seven are creepy but a little too scary for what I’m going for. I also played around with the use of softer or cute looking faces like in four, five, eight and twelve to juxtaposed the bodies of the ghosts and make them seem more deceptively approachable, kind of like an anglerfish uses a light to lure in prey. I really like this idea and added it to one of the final ghost designs but I wanted a more scary look to the ghosts so I went for mouths that looked like sharp teeth without having teeth and slit like eyes like in six and eleven.
—Ghosts—
When finalising the designs that I liked for the ghosts I realised that it kind of looked like the different stages of the ghosts as they stayed longer in the forest so went with that idea and adjusted the designs to better show this progression. In the first design they are round and cute to appear friendly but still have a sharp tail, like a scorpion, to imply that they are still dangerous. In their second stage, the body becomes a little longer to look more like a snake and they get sharper, clawed hands. The third stage enlarges the hands suggesting that they have a stronger hit and are more built for attack. The fourth and final stage is covered in sharp shapes showing that it is the most dangerous of the ghosts as well as heavily leaning into the snake like shape with the longer, thinner body giving the impression of speed and danger.
—References & Initial Ideas—
Referencing the previous ghosts designs and a few different forest and queen motifs I began to design the main antagonist of the forest, The Ghost Queen.
I really like the idea of giving her some form of crown to signify that she is the ruler of all the ghosts as well as sharing some of the features of the ghosts so that she looks as if she belongs in the group. I tried just giving a ghost a veil and a crown made of branches, design two, but I wasn’t overly happy with the result as she just looked like any other ghost with a crown so I tried a more humanoid look. I really like designs one and four so I decided to take them and further mix them together to see if I got anything else I liked.
After combining different elements from the previous two designs that I liked I found that I favoured the more armour looking shoulder/ headdress with a built in crown and no hair but overall I much preferred design four from the previous set of designs. I liked the spikey coils on her dress and shoulders that look like her subjects’ ghost tails as well as appearing like armour which suggests that she is ready for battle against intruders in her forest as well as her dress being flowy to show that she is quick but quiet when she approaches her prey.
Art Style & Guides
—References—
I looked into other media and artists that I liked to influence that art style that I wanted for this project before trailing a few different elements of the style that I liked.
—Art Styles—
Using Vernon as a tester, I tried a few different art styles as well as a few different styles of shadows. I liked the lineless style but felt that a lot of the details became lost. I also liked the use of coloured lines and solid colours so I made a few more iterations using those elements.
I really liked the look of no line weight and the solid coloured lines as well as the use of thinner lines on the inside of the character with a thicker outline as well as the solid colours with cell shading. For the final art style I did thin out the lineart a bit though.
—Guides—
After figuring out the art style and how I wanted all the characters to look, I made a guide on how different elements of the characters were supposed to move and how some aspects were created.
Backgrounds
—References—
For the backgrounds I looked at other media’s backgrounds and looked into different types of trees, pumpkins and jack o’ lanterns.
—Trees—
Once I had the characters figured out, I moved onto figuring out what the environment would look like so I played around with a few different tree designs. I really wanted to create an isolating and imposing environment that made the children appear smaller than they already were as well as making it appear dangerous with sharper branches. I played around with a few different tree types and different colours and shapes for the leaves. Overall, I liked the look of the straight trees with no leaves as they gave the illusion of being impossibly tall like Giant Redwoods, it also makes the forest feel a lot more intimidating and isolating.
—Pumpkins—
After figuring out what the forest would look like I realised that there are very minimal amounts of light and the forest all looks the same which does give the maze-like feeling I wanted but I wanted a few more points of interest so I decided to create a variety of Jack O’ Lanterns to act as lights.
Finalised Designs
—Colour Schemes—
Next was onto the colour schemes for the characters. I knew I wanted to keep with classic colours for the costumes.
For Vernon, I looked at other Vampire and Witch costumes and found that red, black, white and purple most often appeared so I went for those colours. I did try a forest green but I liked the purple better. The red also shows his more reckless, dangerous side when he goes on adventures.
For Franklin, Frankenstein costumes most often come in various shades of green and ghosts are white so I tried those colours in various different combinations as well as a few different styles of face paint. I really liked the white hoodie and green patches as well as the scribbled on face paint.
For Clementine, I struggled the most with her colour scheme the most. I knew I wanted to use orange but wasn’t sure what other colour I wanted to use so I tried a few different combinations from blue to red to green. I really liked the green and orange but it made her look too much like a pumpkin and Franklin already had the colour green on his costume so I decided to experiment more with blue and orange.
After finalising the colours of the kids, I put them all together in a line up to see if all their colours looked good together.
For the Ghost Queen, I first tried blacks, greys and whites to make her appear like a void in the forest but I didn’t like the use of gradients without some structure or pattern. I tried a spikey, torn looking pattern on the headdress and the bottom of her skirt which I liked so I tried a few different colours to make her blend with the background but also stand out among her other ghost subjects.
I really liked the purple as it matched the colour of the sky in the forest and it usually has the connotation of royalty.
For the Ghosts,I knew I wanted to make them all have white in their colours like the Ghost Queen as well as an accent colour. I really liked the idea of using a pink for the round ghost to make them appear soft and friendly. The rest of the ghosts I wanted to follow a gradient from cold colours like green and blue that fade to grey/black to make it seem as they progress they get darker and more evil.
After all the colour schemes were finalised I put all the characters in a line up.
—Turnarounds—
After all the designs were finalised I started on creating the turnarounds for each character. These will make creating the rigs for each character easier as well as creating a few different aspects of the characters that could be seen in the show like Vernon without his cape. Franklin with his hood up, no makeup and no glasses and Clementine with no makeup.
After receiving some feedback from Alec, a tutor, on the turnarounds I added in ¾ angles for each character. Creating these full turnarounds for each character allowed me to explore some aspects of each character that might not be seen from the front or side like the crack on the back of the Ghost Queen’s head.
After completing the turnarounds Sarah, a tutor, suggested using the parts of the turnaround to create simple animations of the characters which I did.
After creating the animations I did notice that Vernon’s hair is flipped on one of the ¾ front angles which I will fix before the final masters show.
Expressions & Poses
When exploring the expressions and poses of each character I knew I really wanted to capture each of their personalities through their facial expressions and actions.
When drawing Vernon I wanted to capture his outgoing and adventurous personality.
For Franklin, I wanted to capture his fear and willingness to hide but also his strength and protectiveness towards his friends. For Clementine, I wanted to show her joyful, fun loving personality as well as her loving but air headedness. For the Ghost Queen and her Ghosts, I wanted to show that they are not only scary hunters but also care for each other and love to hide and watch their prey before striking.
Animations
—Ghost—
For the ghost animation I really wanted to show the transformation from cute and round to an angular, clawed ghost. First I created the frames of the animation with a bit of squash and stretch on the facial features.
Afterwards, I timed out the animation and made a few tweaks to some of the movements. I really like how it looks but I will continue to smooth out the animation for the final masters show.
—Kid—
When deciding what to animate for the kids I was inspired by one of Clementine’s poses that I drew so I decided to animate it. To begin I did a rough line drawing of the arms movement that I then added the sleeve and hand on top of.
After I was happy enough with the movement I made a few adjustments to the frames before timing it.
Next, I timed out the animation and removed a few frames of the arm going back into the bucket as it made it move too slow.
Now that I was happy with the arm movement and timing, I moved onto making the head bob up and down with the movement of the arm by first sketching it in with a circle then adding the heads lineart.
After showing my animation progress to Sarah she told me to add a blink to the animation so I did. I tried just a blink and a blink with a squint but I preferred it with just a blink so that’s what I went with.
I found that two blinks in such a short animation was a bit too much so I removed one of them and adjusted the blinking.
Once I was happy with the progress of the animation, I added Clementine’s colours. For the final masters show I will continue to adjust Clementine’s animation, especially the head movement.
Assets & Poster/Title Card
—Assets—
When assembling the sheets into a presentation, I realised that I didn’t have any backgrounds that I could use underneath some text heavy pages like the contents and synopsis pages. Using the assets that I have already made like the background guide page and the Jack O’ Lanterns to create some pages to use as backgrounds. I also created a sign post surrounded by Jack O’ Lanterns to look a bit like a pumpkin patch so I could create title pages for each section.
—Poster—
For the poster, I really liked some of the poses that I drew of the Ghost Queen looming over the kids so I used that and created a poster. It was at this point in the project that I decided to call this project ‘Halloween Night’. I then rearranged some of the assets and the title to create a landscape title card for the start of the book/presentation.
Final Book
Reflection
Overall, I’m really proud of what I was able to achieve within the six week period of this project. It has been a great experience to practice my skills in concept art and to further research what a concept artist/visual development portfolio consists of.
There are a few things I wish to adjust and continue to work on for the final masters show like the animations and some mistakes in the turnarounds as well as adjusting the formatting to the ‘book’ that all these images will be turned into.