Telling Tales: Character Development

After speaking with Lauren about the characters that we had been exploring, she suggested that we look at animals, as we weren't 100% sure about 'squishy' things or robots. I was happy to explore a few more options so long as we focused upon animals that would be easy to represent with very iconic characteristics, e.g. rabbits, giraffes, elephants, etc. Lauren agreed to this, as she had already started to look at animals before she suggested it to me, so we both went away and came up with a few ideas that we thought would work well.

I focused on creating really quick sketches of animals I thought would be appropriate for our story and I then showed these quick sketches to Lauren to see what she thought. We both agreed that the mouse would be difficult to animate with its tail and the pig's legs wouldn't be long enough to create an easy child equivalent. Therefore, we were left with the giraffe and rabbit. At the time I wanted to explore the rabbit, as I feel that this is a more iconic animal than a giraffe so I tried to create a few different designs for rabbit but I struggled a little to make them appear different. (Max also drew a rabbit for me in the middle of my designs). 

The page with Max's drawing

However, after struggling with this idea, I went to Lauren again, who wanted to explore the giraffes more, and asked her why she wanted to do giraffes. The reason was because they were quite clumsy animals when they are babies and she felt that they'd tie in well with our story. I agreed with this and suggested that deer could also be an animal that we looked at. Lauren agreed to this and so we went away and did drew a character based on a deer, whilst keeping it a biped model to make it easier for us to animate and create in Maya. 

I created two slightly different designs to show to Lauren and after a while we decided that the second design was more appealing and worked better alongside Lauren's designs. However, she still really wanted to go with giraffes, so we came to a compromise of sticking to the design above, but with the skin of a giraffe.