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Making Of Bird Food #Part1





CHARACTER DESIGN -  THE EVOLUTION OF MAN!

Just like a script is never complete on the first draft, the same goes for the character designs. To get to the final version you will always do designs and redesigns until you are happy with them.

The starting point of designing the character is always to read the script. This will give you all of the clues you need to start going about creating a character. The design needs to match the descriptions of the character in the script but also take note of the actions they are doing, as it will inform you how they will need to move etc.

The main character of “Bird Food” is described in the script as:

“A BUSINESS MAN with his sleeves rolled up and his briefcase in hand, walks along a path under trees whistling with the birds. He is a tall, skinny man in his early thirties with 50’s styled brown hair. His tie is slightly undone and he walks with a swagger, happy to be in the sun.”

These lines give us a lot of information about how the character looks and also it starts to give an idea on how the character will move.

Once the script was completed I gave it to several artists to explore possible designs.

I wanted this short to have a real 2D feel to it even though the end result was to be 3D. One of the designers I looked at for reference of possible styles was Nate Wragg. I loved his graphic style but as our designs progressed they went away from this stylised look into something more “life-like”.

Here are examples of the design work from Derek Horan, Andrew Crotty and myself.

  01_Man_DerekHoran

Derek Horan Designs

  02_Man_AndrewCrotty

Andrew Crotty Designs

  03_Man_AndrewCrotty

Andrew Crotty Designs

  03_Man_Poses_AndrewCrotty

Andrew Crotty Pose Designs

  04_Man_Facial_AndrewCrotty

Andrew Crotty Expressions Design

  05_Man_RichardKeane

Richard Keane Design

At this point we were very happy with the design of the man and submitted this in our pitch to the Irish Film Board.

An important thing to remember when designing characters for any project is that they need to work together. In this short we needed the man’s designs to fit in with the pigeons. This was thought about from the start but after reviewing the pigeon designs we just felt that we were going over old ground with the pigeons and we wanted to come up with a new style and design that people hadn’t seen before. This meant we had to go back to the start with the designs of the man.

I asked Nicky Phelan to have a look at the designs and he went through them again. We decided to go back to the graphic style that I wanted from the start and design the characters using simple geometric shapes. The man would be a rectangle and the pigeons would be circles.

Here is some of the exploration work that Nicky did:

  06_Man_Exploration_NickyPhelan

Nicky Phelan Design Explorations

  07_Man_Exploration_NickyPhelan

Nicky Phelan Design Explorations

At this point we were definitely onto something and we went back and explored the pigeons again. Once we locked down the pigeon designs we knew exactly what was required to do to finalise the design of the man…

...and this is where I leave you with an Adam West’s Batman style ending.

So stay tuned to find out how the final design of the Man turned out!

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