Animation: Initial Research #2 Character

Initial Research: Current Production

I will be going in to depth about the research that went into my film scenarios and characters for my current project.
For an overview please view my earlier post here.

Edra the Witch

My witch is not an evil witch but she is sassy, comes across as cruel and domineering, perhaps clumsy at times. From these traits a i drew a few rough characters then found some characters that were similar in attitude.

I wanted her to look like a witch, but also have a glamorous appeal. quite like a 50's pin up girl, this lead me to look at characters like Vampira, Elvira, Lily Munster and Morticia Addams (both versions of the character portrayed by Carolyn Jones and Anjelica Huston). In terms of appearene I think these character capture perfectly dark witch/vampiric characters, I wanted this mysterious dark vibe with my own character too. As for personality they all possess an attractive arrogance, that situated them higher than anybody in the room.

Sybill Trelawney

I also wanted to make her a bit bumble-y, I immediately thought of Sybill Trelawney the Professor of Divination from Harry Potter. All these characters I purposely used aesthetic and personality traits from.

As far as animated characters, I looked at Disney's Cruella-de-Vil and the Evil Queen (Queen Grimhilde) From Snow White. They are inherently evil, but I thought I would take this to create a false sense of evil; my witch likes to be intimidating but it is not ultimately who she is this is why I love Cruella's sassiness, she doesn't have anytime for drivel, she just wants things to be her way, she is very much as snob. Like wise with the Evil Queen, just that she is much more two-face about it. I love both of these personality traits and i have studied their expressions and movement.
In terms of design, I like the exaggeration on Cruella's figure and how squinty the Evil Queens eyes can go, both I have implemented in to my character.

Phobos the Cat/Raven 

The cat was originally my main character where a Edra the witch was more of a background character, but it later developed that they would feature equally in the scenarios. 

I knew that the cat would have some magic ability, maybe a spell gone wrong on Edras part. I was thinking either an odd fur colouration, glowing runes, tattoos maybe a garment like a little witch hat or a saddle bags to put him apart from the rest.

I settled on transformation I dabbled with having him covered with eyes or transforming into array of creatures, I settled with a raven transformation and the eyes .. he is magic after all. 

Mouse

Mouse line work, by myself. 

He is a one-off character for the Cat & Mouse scenario. He is there to demonstrate my figurative animation, he is a chubby little glutton that tries to steal Phobos' bowl of mile then gets his just desserts.
I am collaborating with my friend Alex Thompson for this, she is designing me a mouse character that would work for the scenario. Click here to see some of her work. 

However I do have a couple of concepts myself.

Demon 

I had a lot of trouble designing this character, he was going to start off as an imp familiar that would transform into a cat and visa versa. He was meant to be small and mischievous, I still liked the idea so I put it on a back burner.
I later realised that I would not have enough time to go into intricate detail of the transformation with the amount of time i had to make a show reel. Since I am now aiming for the film brief now I could of gone into more depth with the transformation of the character. Alas, the character has changed into a demon that Edra summons from a fire and Phobos gets rid off when they realise summoning the creature was a grave mistake.


 That is all for Initial research: Characters so far!!