This week I have collected some moodboard materials for the assets. I tried to find the correct mood and feeling for the short film visual style. I like the style of cartoon with the mid-realistic textures. And after I got some feeling about characters I started to skecth them... So here we go!

Character Design

I started design from the basic primitive shapes. I try to make simple and believable characters. And of course they need to fit them roles. There will be two main characters. Other characters will be just a silhouette shapes in the auditorium.

Big-O

Main robot who is the star of this show is named Big-O. It's first prototype of the battle robot in the 1900 century. That's the reason why it's so silly and pitiful, but it works somehow.

Lisa

Second main character will be Lisa robot. This robot was designed for the babysitting. This robot is more smarter and represents cute look.

Theory of Character Design

There is good article about character design in http://www.computerarts.co.uk/features/20-character-design-tips. There is also very good book "Ideas for the Animated Short" where is talked about character design. I really can recommend this book for anyone who is interested about making of short films and those who working with the stories. I tried to remember these tips while I have design my characters.

Inspiration for the Character Design

Moodboard

You know what is moodboard?

A mood board is a type of poster design that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. Designers and others use mood boards to develop their design concepts and to communicate to other members of the design team. Mood boards are often used by graphic designers to enable a person to illustrate visually the direction of style which they are pursuing. - Wikipedia

I think moodboard is great way to get the feeling about the visual style. It's great method for the teams, but I use it by myself too quite often. If you got some feelings about visual direction, moodboard can really help you to describe it better to you or your team. And it's very fast in thesedays, just go with google image search 😉 I also like to use 3D sites because there is so much good materials for the moodboards.

Overview

Now if I think all of these pre-production phases, I can say it was quite big step for me. There is so much different things what I have done in this project already even there isn't any 3D part yet... I realisize how often I have skipped all of these steps in earlier projects. So much good infos I have lost because I was too hasty. So I can give one advice: Do all parts in project, not just those what is most funniest for you... 😉

Next I'll start to do some modelling. More specifically I'll start to do Big-O! I think it's funny part and can not wait till to get something to show. See you!