OUAN406 - Designing Characters

During the idea stage of development and the initial planning of the animation, I made the decision to only feature one character throughout the 30 second title sequence, the main character; Isaac Van Der Grimnebulin. The reason for this is to not give too much of the plot away through characters, and at the beginning of the book I'm adapting very few characters are mentioned. As this title sequence acts as almost a prologue for the adaptation, I thought it would be best to keep the character count to a minimum and focus on the main character. Another reason is time and focusing my efforts into producing one detailed character in my opinion will be more beneficial to the overall quality of the final product, as oppose to creating two or three characters and dropping the overall quality of them.

To gather ideas for how I was going to interpret and draw an initial sketch for Isaac I looked at descriptions of him from the novel and descriptions of him from sources online. 'We see Isaac, who is fat like a blimp is fat (taut skin), therefore definitely not fat like a sack of potatoes is fat (blobby, knobby, and apt to spill out over his belt). A vivid image for me is of his many grey body hairs sticking straight up from his blimp-taut skin.'

The process for the character design was after looking at descriptions of the character from the book and forming an image of him based on the content I searched online for various references relating to the description. Some of the aspects of the main character that I looked up references for were; body shapes, facial hair, faces, goggles and industrial or victorian era clothing. These together allowed me to draw properties of his clothing and anatomy correctly, the design started out as a loose sketch in my sketchbook which took around 20 to 30 minutes because I was continually adjusting various sections such as the size of his stomach and the arch of his back to make it look like he was putting in a lot of effort carrying his large body mass. Getting this aspect right and making him look like a heavy, sluggish man was probably the most difficult part of the design. After the idea was completed on paper, I took it into photoshop and adjusted his proportions further, making sure everything was as I thought it should be before I redrew the lines in a cleaner way. Due to the versatility of photoshop, I was able to continually change parts of his design with little effort and managed to include a belt equipped with various tools, some damage to his coat. I also changed the position of his right arm to give him a more dynamic pose. After several reworks I came up with a design I was happy to colour and call finished, sampling colours from various images to make sure the colour scheme worked well and didn't look too unrealistic whilst maintaining his dark and serious disposition.