Development of the Piper Character

We have finally made it! Yes that’s right, I’m going to explain the development of the piper character, hard to believe it I know but I have actually managed to find time to talk about her.

She has been through three different stages of development:

As I have mentioned umpteen times my final project has its roots in a project which we where assigned in the first year. Back then she was completely different to how she is now and was a very Aardman inspired sort of character with a very caricatured sort of look. Here are some sketches of her which I did back in second year when the storey was still about a crazy old lady who threw puppies in a river. I’m quite found of this design and I think it would fit in well with the storey which I am now using but she would have been a pain to animate in 2D and near impossible for me to construct for stop-motion.



Over the summer the story changed quite drastically into a poncy arty thing and so did the piper. She became very scribbly and free flowing, allowing her to pull off quite a large range of poses. This new style emerged out of my default scribble drawings which I usually revert to when I’m messing about with an idea and a desire to keep things as simple as possible. I definitely knew that I wanted to do stop-motion but after the Robots project I was very wary of puppets and was instead aiming for something which I envisaged could just be maid out of a big blob of plastercine.
She was originally going to be really sinister and evil too, essentially the previous version of the character with all the funny removed.

After the summer the story was changed around quite a bit but the piper remained pretty much the same until the end of the last term. Visually she has not changed too much but the nature of the character has changed quite a lot. The storey has had a lot more humor injected back into it and the piper is a lot more like she was originally. She does have sinister motives but she is also funny, Visually, she still has a big blobby body which stretches about quite a lot but there has been the addition of a feathered hat, since that is the sort of thing a imagine a piper would ware and for comedy value she has a very well developed set of boobies, courtesy of Holly and Georg.


Note: Blogger doesn't want to behave this evening and is refusing to upload any more picture, hopefully it will decide to play tomorrow,