Designing the Fish

With the Fish I am going for an evil yet playful character because the fish doesn't want to kill the gnome but just stop him from getting to the other side of the pond. So what I want from the character is a playful yet slightly evil exterior, large eyes with a way to get a frown in the face with out giving the fish an eyebrow, and a large tail to do some strong swimming and whacking the gnome in the animation, which will be in the animatic soon.

I so far have two designs for this :-

 These are both goldfish, I was advised by Alan to use this fish, we found some images of goldfish with large stomachs and thought that this would be a good area to use to show that it is either always hungry or that it has room for the gnome. I have given the both quite sharp fins to show its evilness. Making a frown on a fish was obviously hard to do but I found that goldfish a sort of ridge that go up the centre of the face, and I chose to make this the area to move to make a frown - I think it works well.  

After a talk with Alan - Character Design

I recently had a talk with Alan, firstly about the design of the main gnome character. He had some very important pointers that have helped the character out tremendously. He advised me to focus on the curves of my character, this will give the character a style and flowing look throughout. He also wanted me to make the bread a little larger because he liked the way it covered the body. It also advised me not to keep a mouth in the design so that all the emotion for the gnome came from his eyes and eyebrows.

So this weekend I went away and did a few drawings - They instantly looked a lot better and that they had a life to them.

This is what I came up with -

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As I was playing around with proportions, things started to slot into place. I had to allocate enough bread in the character for it to cover him yet I had to make it practical to model and animate. At first he was really chubby but as the design process moved forward, he started to lose some weight.

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Summary of the Day - 19th February

Today has been a very good day for me, I have sorted out some problems and I now have an insite into the look of my characters. I think I have been wuite productive today, and I hope it continues - I'm getting really excited for my animation, ideas are constantly popping in my head - I have some ideas on how to change my animatic for the better which hopefully makes the animation clearer in the end.

Female Gnome Design 01

My initial thought with the female character was to have a long blonde haired beautiful gnome, but after drawing the beginning ideas for the male - that idea for the female no longer made sense. So I have gone for an elderly lady gnome, which fits a lot better and I hope it will be cuter in the end. I am far from finished with this characters design, but i liked this as a base - Bo has mentioned that she isn't cute enough and that the hat makes her look like a witch - which I must say, I agree with.

Gnome designs 03

This design is a bit more pleasing to me - it is more stylised and charming. However it still doesn't tick all my boxes because I don't think this will be easily animatable. But I like my progress - I am going to look at some new character design books and hopefully they can help me.

Gnome Designs 02

These designs are now getting better, I really like these, I'm gonna work on them a bit more and hopefully get a more refined design.

Gnome designs 01

I found it difficult to draw a good gnome in my sketchbook because all the line work was restricting me from creating something bold and new. So here I have gone into photoshop and obtained a large brush and just got painting without focusing on line work. I quite like these orginal sketches but I can definitely push so much harder!

Newest Animatic with sound

New Storyboard

I had a talk with Alan and we noticed that the original idea was pretty lengthy and complex, in its story line and set building - So we narrowed the set down so that it will take place just around a pond - the story has simplified to just getting to the other side of the pond - the story also doesn't end in tragedy any more because that wasn't coming off in the right light, no one liked that he failed at the end, it now ends with hope of love :) So this is the animatic - hope you enjoy :)