Monday - Myself and my partner came together to discuss the storyboards that we had independantly come up with and worked to see what we could pool together. We came up with the establishing scene of the mother bringing the boys a package to their room and them bickering in order to establish their relationship to the audience. However we were struggling to get the catalyst for what causes them to find immortality. My partner really likes the idea that they find immortality but at the result of them becoming a blob that cant move and time passes around them. Currently I'm not entirely sold on this idea because i didnt know how we'd get to this point.
Tuesday - I began drawing out character designs based off of my mood board for the wizard. These first drawings were really lackluster in design as there was nothing that made them jump out and make them interesting. I chose to focus on the rounder but longer shapes to emphasize the dorky character he embodies as it was the only design element i liked.
While developing the shape and design i thought about characters that wore pointed hats and robes but were simple and 'Over the Garden Wall' came to mind. Mainly Wirt's clothing with the red hat and cloak. This made the character skinnier than we originally planned but we came up with a nice contrast between having a really tall brother and a much shorter brother, similar to over the garden wall. We wanted them to have contrasting but similar shapes as well so my partner designed her character as if it was an onion and i designed it like a corn on the cob. These later designs have so much more character than the previous ones and they really encompass the personality traits of him; Petty, Narcissistic, Ignorant of himself and the world around him. Right now he also looks too young, him and his brother are 33 and 35 respectively so they need to look older.
Wednesday - While i liked yesterdays designs i started to think about how we would actually translate this into maya while keeping it simple and easy to model. So i started to draw it out as a low poly character made of squares. We had agreed on a low poly maya model so that it would render faster and would be easier to model as neither of us have modelled a character before. for inspiration on how to present our characters design we looked at Pixel Pit, a youtube animator who uses a blocky, janky, stop-motionesque style on maya. This helped to come up with much more square and stunted bodies which we both really liked but we want to try and design them inn a way that isn't just ripping off Pixel Pits animation style. Because i was struggling to visualise what this cuboid shape would look like i opened up maya and started to play around with the software to get an appealing cuboid shape. I created a shape that used cut off corners and an elevated top and bottom this helped me to understand what shape we were working with.
Thursday - Since we had an idea of the body shape we started to design the characters in more detail with this shape in mind because of the blocky shape we were using i decided to cut the top of his wizard hat as i was struggling how to comprehend how to make a point, this does make him look a lot more like a American settler or witch hunter. With the comparison of mine and my partners designs we agreed that my character should be the taller of the two giving the other brother a complex over how short he is going off of the brothers mutual distain towards each other. We also talked about What the face of our characters should look like as we are applying 2D assets to them. The initial sketches were very cute and not what we were looking for, my partner felt they needed to be uglier which i agreed with, we needed to be able to get across these were two sad little men. We gave them neck beards and double chins, works well at making them look stupid as well as slightly dead inside.
Our tutor came around and talked to us about where we were going with our project and explained how we weren't getting very far with a narrative with no clear finish or how our storyboard develops. We were struggling to figure out our catalyst for the ensuing chaos and we were too focused on the idea that they were in their mothers basement especially if we were going to some how show the centuries passing once they're merged together. So we changed it to something more akin to a garage with windows showing the outside and as the world gradually changes with the centuries. Also instead of a goat we changed it to a chicken as while the goat is associated with the devil chickens get sacrificed more often we felt. This lead to the idea that the catalyst for the chaos was 'running around like a headless chicken' literally! the wizard would sacrifice the chicken but it would remain alive and fly around the room causing mayhem. We made the chicken a simple round shape so that we could model it easily and quickly.
Finally, as we felt we were on a roll we created a rough story board from posted notes. The rough overview of the story is that the brothers are trying to become immortal for a competition, one through magic the other through science and they hate each other so the room is split with a no crossing policy. But the wizard draws a magic circle over the line which leads to a series of event that results in the circle activating and the two of them fusing into an immortal being.
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