Right this is a big bastard, had to come up with a stop-frame short based on one of 3 scripts we were given. We chose one to do with a guy trapped in a cell and when i say based i mean seriously loosely based. We struggled coming up with a story at first mainly because we were a group of six and all had very different ideas of where to take it also some took rejection a little more personally than others. In the end we went for Greg's initial idea of it eventually turning out to be a boy who has been grounded and he's imagining being in prison, we then all added little ideas till we had the full story.
My main role at the start was to design and create the characters, having never done character design for a 3-D, fully pose-able model before I decided to look at some of the pro's before i jumped in.
We had already decided that there wasn't going to be any dialogue in it and if there was it wouldn't be from the main character. This naturally lead me to
the greatest silent actor in stop-frame animation............. this pimp on the right,
Gromit's eyebrows and ears are all nick park needs to display the most subtle of emotions and usually to ball-achingly hilarious effect. I knew our guy probably couldn't pull off a pair of dog ears but i was defiantly goin' for the big ol' eyebrows.
Although the eyes are a large part of portraying emotion it's the body language that will make it all the more convincing and i think the best use of this recently was the character Wybie from Coraline.
Although all the characters in Coraline are facially animated excellently Wybie gives of an amazing sense of awkwardness with a simple shrug or dragging his feet slightly. Our character is going to go through a range of emotions and if he can act anywhere near as well as this guy we'll be gravy.
In terms of appearance it has to be someone that can pass as a trampy prisoner and a small child, all i knew was that i wanted him in full, classic prison/robber attire and I couldn't stop thinking about the wolf from Tex Avery's 'Droopy'.
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