Applied Animation: Character Mood Board

Taking references from the book itself I decided to stick to the appearance the book uses for my design of the first character Death. In Mort this character is described as the very stereotypical 'grim reaper' so I decided to search for images of the grim reaper to gain some inspiration for my own Death character.

So I found this one quite easy to do, as there isn't much to the character really. I feel that this will be a case of getting the characters personality right through his movement and actions rather than his overall appearance, as it is quite simple and there's not much to it. I am going to have to practice drawing skeletons and billowing capes though. 

The second character, which is Mort himself was a lot more difficult to think about, as his appearance plays a big part in portraying his personality and his overall character. Mort is described as a tall, red-haired boy who appears to be built out of knees. Instantly that made me think of someone who is very clumsy and has a very thin, almost unnatural body shape, so I started to think about cartoon characters that I felt would help me to design this character the most.

Whilst I thought about it a lot of the male characters from Pixar's Brave came into mind because of the hair colour and because of the body shape of some of the characters. I also then began to think of characters from Laika's works, as they tend to be quite slim built characters. In particular I feel that Eggs from The Boxtrolls will strongly influence my character design because I feel that he appears to be tall and certainly looks clumsy. 

Overall, I feel that I have made a good start on my mood boards and I am confident that I will be able to start the initial designs for my characters, as I feel that I have some good starting references to work from.