Getting the character design is always a tough part of any film. We’ve been through the mill on this short already and have done quite a few versions:

This was the first design of Professor Orit that we settled on, drawn up by Derek Horan:

(click on all the images to enlarge them)

Was it just me or was Professor Orit looking a bit like this bloke?

I liked how these were looking but they were probably a bit too loose to go straight to 3D.

Here were a few more developed coloured up full body designs:

Based on these drawings we went to first draft grey scale of the models. Here is our first attempt at them:

So Professor Orit seemed like he was getting somewhere… then we turned our attention towards his young student.

These were the intial designs that we had originally submitted with the proposal:

Based on this character we did up some sketches to try to draw some form out of the character:

and from these sketches we tried to model the head:

I realised that we had sort of backed ourselves into a creative brick wall, as I thought the student’s head was just becoming a bit generic and didn’t really have much character. Looking back at the model of the Professor I also realised that they were starting to look like they were two different styles, and I wasn’t sure if either one of them suited the style of the backgrounds. So we made the difficult decision of throwing everything away and starting again from scratch to try to nail the characters.

I really like the work of Peter Donnelly from The Station and I’d worked with him before, so we gave him a shout to see if he would like to have a go at redesigning the characters. This is what he came up with:

I thought these were working really well. They weren’t a million miles away from what we previously had but I felt that they brought a lot more character. We immediately got to modelling on these designs, and these were the first draft models:

I like where these designs are headed, but we still need to do a bit of work on them. The shoes are a bit cartoony and we need to add detail to the clothes but I like where we’ve ended up.

There are still lots of things we need to figure out, like how are we going to do the hair? How do we treat the cloth? I’ll let you know how we get on!