Premise: Character Design (Part 1)

For my premise tutorials, I've been discussing the idea of having a character based film. I started by looking at cartoons I enjoy so I could try and make up my own idea based around what would typically be seen on animation networks aimed towards younger audiences.

When speaking to Justin, I came to the conclusion that I could base the idea of the film, should it follow a story instead of being a sequence, on personal experiences of moving somewhere new and worrying about not fitting in from when I was younger. This is because most of the cartoons I looked at in my analysis always involve some degree of personal experiences from their creators and other staff members implemented into character design, story, or environment design.

Speaking to both Alan and Justin had me exploring a character based off of myself as the main character of the film. Since cartoons I enjoy have protagonists ranging from all sorts of ages (such as younger children, teenagers, and even adult characters), I decided to make a few designs based on myself at different stages in my life using old photographs as a reference. I intend to go on to look at exploring these further and then looking at my family, in case the design I settle on ends up being a younger one as opposed to the older designs.

I haven't settled on a colour palette or outfit design yet, either. I intend to work on this as I progress further.

Since the story idea was based off of the specific yet somewhat universal experience of entering a new place, I thought that the other characters might not be human to illustrate the point that the main character doesn't feel like they fit in. I broke this down into two 'themes' that Justin suggested I could explore; mythological creatures and anthropomorphic animals. Alan also suggested I look at Pictoplasma, a website aimed at showcasing different character designs - the idea that perhaps there might not even be a story involved but rather sequences of different characters also cropped up. 

For the story, though, I thought about having the main character move either alone if older or with family if younger at the beginning to show them physically leaving the familiarity of the old environment, and I have thought about using contrasting colour schemes to illustrate the differences between the familiar place versus the new environment.

I haven't gotten very far in my exploration of the other designs, but so far, I decided to look at centaurs, mermaids, and an imp/gargoyle-like creature. I made a list of other mythological creatures to look at from all sorts of folktales and myths, such as; cockatrices, hellhounds, phoenixes, kelpies, jackalopes, cerberus, griffins, unicorns/pegasi, cyclopes, chimeras, demons, dwarves, elves, fairies, ghosts, manticores, golems, medusa, satyrs/fauns, sphinxes, sasquatches, vampires, werewolves, and the undead/zombies.

Should I decide to develop the story idea, I will try to integrate these designs whichever of the town or school ideas I end up sticking with.

The alternative was to look at my character design project's anthropomorphic designs and simplify them. This was done in effort to make them look cuter and friendlier, though I did explore varying degrees of anthropomorphism; this meant making a scale of slightly anthropomorphic with mostly regular animal traits versus what is essentially a humanoid body with an animal head and a tail in the same vein as my main characters from my character design project.

Other species that I intend to look at alongside exploring those below in more depth include lions, tigers, wolves, birds, goats, pigs, reptiles, horses, sheep, cows/bulls, deer/moose/elk, bears, hyenas, rabbits, and other rodents.

If I were to pursue the story idea, I spoke to Justin about settling with a beach/coastal town environment. This is because that is also rooted in personal experience of going on holiday to Charmouth, Dorset with my family every year and as nostalgia is becoming a bigger focus in newer cartoons, I wanted to focus on somewhere that I could also look back on while also drawing inspiration from it and merging it with other places to create an entirely new environment. I decided to look through my own photographs taken there; the ones below are from West Bay.

Other places I've been to with my family include Poole, Swanage, Lyme Regis, Somerset, and Cornwall (specifically Penryn and Falmouth). I might also draw further inspiration from the coastal sections of Reykjavik that I visited during a trip to Iceland. I want to combine elements from all of these places and hopefully stylise them enough that I can create a convincing world out of it all should I decide to pursue the story concept.