'Viking-Wear' Ideas

I've botched together a few examples of different styles I could create on top of our character, very simple the grey layer represents a fabric and the black layer metal armour. The idea of this exercise was to 'sick up our ideas' as Alan said. Vikings did not have much armour in the 8th-9th century, however because our animation isn't strictly running along the lines of realism it means we can push out towards a more stereotypical feel for their dress code and hopefully play around a bit more with the design of our main character.

Fig.1 Fabric                                                                    Fig.2 Armour 

Pushing the Initial Sketches

After discussing the initial sketches I produced for the group this weekend I decided to make a very quick speed sketch of the head from both front and side views as well as taking on board what my group mates have had to say about the sketches to see how I can push the face of this design.

Initial Character Sketches

When I found myself in the countryside yesterday I decided to go back to pen and paper and try to come up with some concepts for narrative. I tried to base my sketches on the bulky friendly giant character we want our viking to be. Although these aren't final concepts I think our group will learn a lot from the feedback of what people like and dislike about each one.

Figure 1.                                                                 Figure 2.

Figure 3.                                                                 Figure 4.

Understanding Characters

After our tutorial, it was apparent that we un-noticeably had more than the two characters as we intended. Though the additional characters were not going to be physically embodied characters that would appear as such, the understanding of their characteristics and attributes would be crucial in developing either their animation, or their voice work.


The Viking

Our main focus regarding animation will be on the character of our Viking as he will feature as the lone 3D character. Our Viking will be the villain of our story, and will take influence from an 800-900 A.D. English perspective, believing that Vikings were 'demons' from another land. With this in mind, we want to create a character that can be perceived as a form of 'natural' evil, but as the same time be likable. Referring to these ideas, we need to ensure our design has the toughness of a viking through the development of a his body build, a somewhat frightening face, and an assortment of props. Additionally, we would also like to base his actual character on something similar to Shrek, where his monstrous looks do not necessarily fit his personality. This will give us an opportunity to create more comedic affect with the Viking, and provide some room to express that he is really soft-at-heart despite his menacing appearance.

The English Bard
The bard is an interesting character. Even though he will primarily only feature as an off screen narrator, we need an understanding of how his character would deliver a ballad, and the way in which this may affect the other elements of the animation. Essentially, our narrative is this character's own personal story who, more importantly, is our story's main 'hero'. With this in mind, this guy needs to be likable and have the ability to be found interesting by an audience and, at the same time, perhaps be able to convey the emotions that he may or may not have felt during the events of the narrative.

The Three Puppeteers

These three characters are going to play a big part when it comes to animating the 2D portions of our production. The initial concept behind these characters is to allow their personalities to play off of one another off screen in comedic ways through visual communication which is suggestive and reflective of their characteristics. After much discussion we decided that using three puppeteers was the ideal fit to our scenario, as the idea of having a clash of trio of personalities allowed for creative developed around the roots of its comedic value, much like the Three Stooges or the Three Amigos.

Ideally, we want to have one puppeteer who will share characteristics of a poster-boy/'perfect student' who is punctual and flawless, another who will be clumsy and forgetful who has awful timing and can be seen as the fool, and then finally another who is a lazy and lack awareness who generally has the 'I can't be bothered' school boy attitude. With these character traits in mind, animating in a style that allows the interpretation of a commotion behind the scene would fit with the rest of the humor throughout.

Visual Research #2.

Following from the previous set of visual influence Shannon collected, my specific areas of research related to the basic viking-styled patterns, toy and 'pop-up' theatre, and weapon/armor design. The first set of images in Figure 1 present a variety of line drawings that are related to the time period, and can stylistically provide us with base ideas when deriving our style and further developing our branding.

Figure 2 shows examples of pop-theatre and toy theatre. Considering our idea, it was relevant that we gained an understanding of how the layout of the sets would work so that our own environment would have a similar layout to create depth and perspective. The design and graphic nature of some of these examples could also contrast with the tapestry designs from our previous influences with the addition of our own illustrations.

And finally Figure 3 focused on collecting a series of basic weapon and armor designs that were from 800-900 A.D. Shape is important here as their simplistic nature would be the keystone for designing our characters props as I feel that our project would benefit from exaggeration and simplistic designs.

Figure 1                                                 Figure 2                                                     Figure 3