The Creatures

The time is finally here! Yes, I am going to talk about the development of my characters – I can hardly believe it myself. Today I think I shall talk about the development of the ‘creatures’ as they are now known, mainly because I am feeling a bit lazy today and I have lots of videos that I can show you rather than describing everything.


Here we go then, I am sure I have mentioned on numerous occasion the origins of this project but just for kicks I will go through it again. Way back when in the first year we did a project with Kathy where we where given a poem which we where supposed to turn into a storyboard. My poem was The Dog by Ogden Nash, which was basically all about how wonderful dogs are – until I got my hands on it that is. I successfully turned it into a delightful ode to sexism, ageism and animal cruelty in which a crazy old lady who threw puppies in a river. After completion this project was promptly forgotten about until it was unearthed last year as something to play with in my spare time. I didn’t really touch the storey but instead focused on character development – here are some quick doodles I did. Although a long way off from the final design I was still going for that cutsie roleypoley look.



Over the summer these characters where significantly simplified and stylized into blobs with tails. This clip shows an early prototype which I gave eyes and a brow as both Derek and Andy suggested this would give them a bit more expression.




Last term I also spent a lot of time experimenting with different types of armatures for the creatures. Originally I intended for them to be made of solid plastercine with wire for the tail but this just fell apart during animation. Through trial and error and a lot of help from Georg I found that the best method of construction was to sculpt the plastercine around a Styrofoam body in which the wire tail was mounted. I also used a bit of wirte for a neck joint. The problem that I found with this was that the movement was quite restricted and wooden, as these tests show. However, I did like the weired glide effect that could be achieved by shooting everything on ones.




The other problem which is blatantly obvious is the dead expressions, tis was remedied with some nice big beads which gave the characters a good puppy eye look. At one point I was also toying with using replaceable heads to try and get some emotion into the characters. Georg lent me some Nightmare Before Christmas toys to have a play with. It worked quite well but I came the conclusion that i didn't fancy building umpteen heads for my horde of little creatures.

I can't remember if it was my idea or somebody else's (probably the latter) to change the shape of the characters to try and work in a bit more movement and loveability. Regardless, the general idea was to simplify everything to make it as easy as possible to animate. I ended up with the wonderful blob, here is the moment i discovered it. I then spent the rest of my time playing with the blob to work out the best way to animate it, the best examples of which can be seen in the design bible, everything else can be viewed at:http://www.youtube.com/user/ShadyJoe47 .