Cheer Up Guys

So after collecting a few pictures of the dark ones, of course I mean Emos, this isn't a racist blog, I messed around with a few designs, just experimenting with style and character traits.

This is a great way of working, seeing things i would normally of missed also it's helping with my drawing in general. Still not sure about a style but the reference helped no end. will keep collecting and sketching.

Aaaghhh! It's Horrible...

So yeah I'll be designing a handful of characters based on the teenage groups of Birmingham. This allows me to work heavily from first hand research which I pretty much suck balls at. This does also mean however that i'm gunna have to get my 'Attenborough' on and bravely walk into their respective territories and photograph them in they're natural habitats, and when it comes to Chavs and Emos this is a very scary prospect.
Heres a bit of preliminary research I did for the Emos.

The top left image was from 'Pigeon Park' in Birmingham which is where a lot of the Emos hang out and look miserable much like this gentleman hear. I want to carry on like this and collect images for all the groups, the more I take the more ideas i'll get for characters and not just rely on stereotypes.

Finish Him!

I've decided that the best way to fit in several different characters, all based on young people of today, would be to have them as a roster for a fighting game. This means that the characters won't have a story line to worry about but all of they're traits and backstory need to be portrayed purely in they're design and stances. Also because they will be beating several shades of shit out of each other the design of all the characters needs to look cool so people belonging to that particular group want to play as them but also slightly ridiculing so that others have fun beating them up.
Other fighting games do this but usually with different fighting styles instead of groups of teenagers.

Here are three good concept designs for characters from the Soul Calibur series, now by no means are all the designs like this but you can get a clear idea of what these characters personalities, fighting styles and backgrounds are like just from looking at them. This is exactly what i will be striving for with my designs.

Heres a few examples of bad design that give almost no information.

                                               

First of all we get nothing about either of their personalities, the only reason we know either of them like fighting is because she's holding a sword. Everything about the lower design was crafted purly to show off the large chesticles and arse. Nothing wrong with boobs and arse but at least try and make them relevant somehow. Must try to avoid this.

We Got A Lotta Catching Up To Do...

So I've decided i'm gunna design some characters based around teenagers and the different groups they belong to, movies caught on to this idea a long time ago that for a young person to relate to a film they're gunna have to see young people in it. Sounds obvious but for some reason the video game industry has completely neglected this fact.

I know that we couldn't exactly have a 'Breakfast Club' game without some serious innovation but this is the sort of thing we should be striving for, even until then we have movies like 'Scott Pilgrim' where young people are action stars which would make for an easy transition into a high end video game. It doesn't even have to be teenagers, we've always known that a good story comes from a normal person in an extraordinary situation or vice-versa but at the moment in video games it just seems to be extra ordinary people in extra ordinary situations. This is basic story telling knowledge that a whole medium is ignoring. 

Take films like 'Shaun of the Dead' or 'Zombieland', both zombie movies, a genre that video games have embraced with open arms, but what gets lost in the translation is that instead of a nervous teen or a pair of slobs in the games it's always men built like brick shit houses and women with huge boobs. 

Surrounded by zombies = scared

Surrounded by zombies = horny

I mean what the fu*k??

The Beginning Of The End

So, here we are, it seems we have reached the delicious desert of our three year animation feast. Although I must say the main was a little tasteless and the entertainment was lackluster. Stop watching 'Come Dine With Me' Joe.
So anyway it's the third year which means we do pretty much whatever we want with very little help, those who know me will find this idea laughable, never the less, i'm looking forward to it. After months of soul searching, yes it was that dramatic, I've decided my true calling lies in character design. I've been doing some intern work for 'Oop Studios' in this area which has been going well, will post some shortly.
So I needed to come up with an idea of what to work on for specialist study 1 which is our first project, again it has no brief and the learning outcomes were especially "helpful" this time with sub sections such as
"Reading List: ...How do we know? It's your project"
Like I said, I knew I wanted to design characters but it wasn't until I saw this amusing display that I noticed what a stagnant pool of sh*t most AAA video game design had become.

I mean can someone tell me why a medium mostly used by twenty something male nerds but also increasingly women and young children as well is only being represented by men who look like they shave with wood chippers and wash their hair with gravel. Video games are so far behind when it comes to representing their audience it's unreal. I want to come up with something that is actually relatable for young people and make characters they can identify with even if only slightly. More to come folks, I can tell you're intrigued. 

Some people do essays, I do this.

Once we had the audio recorded it was time for some broadway skills, it took a few takes to get comfortable with it and to learn the dialogue off by heart but I couldn't upload the early takes because the files we're too big. Heres the best bits that we stitched together.

Will and I went through all the footage we had and chose the clips that looked the most natural but were also entertaining, next we went through the final video and sketched out the most important beats which are pretty much when the character is at it's most expressive. These can later be translated into key-frames. Here are the drawings i took of the footage.

This guy gets paid for this...

Gunna have to do some acting reference so i thought i'd have a look at how the pros go about it, it looks like this guy is really annoying but the over acting totally works for this purpose. You can see how similar his animation is to what he acted, this is definitely the best way to get natural results.

So awesome, i think for the best results I'll have to try my hardest to not be shy in any way because it's the loose, relaxed approach that clearly gets the most natural movements.

Lipstick Tests

Before you ask I haven't turned transexual, and even if I have this isnt the appropriate blog for suczh things. Lipstick camera is when you record the audio with a video as well so you can catch all the beats of the person's face while they say them, it helps with lip syncing and with acting later on. Heres my first attempt at recording.

Well the sound came out okay but my face was a little flat, was concentrating too much me thinks. Tried again a few times and heres a snippet from the final one. It's not too important to get the acting right as we'll record that separately later but needed to get the audio perfect and make sure there is some emotion for reference.

The voice of an Angel

After that horrible piece of research I had to do I came up with a few ideas for the voice of this guy. Used the dialogue Will had already written for it and Sorry guys, it's just audio so no handsome face for ya, used a screenshot of the character he's using.

So I sent these off to Will so he could see which are his favorites, Once I've heard from him we can go over refining the right voice then do some recorded dialogue with it.

Some Tasty Scriptin'

One of the things Will said he was struggling with was thinking of a short gag to fit in his film at the end of the credits. We like totally so kept in contact over facebook so we could bounce ideas around and he could update me with what else he needed.

Obviously I had floods of hilarious ideas pretty much immediately, it was almost annoying.

Of course that was a lie, i was racking my brains for ages, Will said he needed something simple that wouldn't destroy his sizable mind so i went for something that could re-use all the assets he already had and not require another character. I wrote a brief script for hi

m with a gag about a dart board, frankly its genius.

I was pretty pleased with this, im sure you can't read it but take my word for it, it's awesome. However this message was to follow.

Will rightly pointed out that if we made something that long it would take another few months to animate, he liked it though so we basically just cut it down to him defending himself on phone.