Character Designs

The first step towards creating an NSS sting would be the design stage. Without design I would have no central protagonist, no layouts, no backgrounds and without careful and in depth design none of my created characters would have the appeal or depth i wanted them to have. Therefore this stage is arguably one of the most important stages in the whole pipeline. Following are selected pages and drawings from my sketchbook from which i began to design my piece.

Here we can see my original sketches for designing the robot I would later call "Chip". I decided to start with the head as this was, in my eyes, the most important element of the character. It is where I would be doing most of the "acting" and emoting so it needed to be a solid design to allow me to get the most form my character. I tried to keep to quite a traditional "loony tunes/disney" round shapes style as this is what appeals to me most and feel will appeal to a lot of people out there. It also gives me more scope to push the poses and movement in the animation to give a more entertaining performance.

first design sketches for "Chip's" head

Shown below are some more concept work sketches from my design sketchbook. My aim with the other robots in the piece was to give them a more boring feel, like they were blending into the background and part of some mundane life that never changed so I opted to use angular shapes, more boxlike to give a sense of old technology but not push that too much so it still gave the futuristic impression I wanted.

top left: "generic bot" initial designs, top right: concept landscape, bottom right: first storyboard

Here is a final coloured draft of my storyboard. Although finished, this storyboard actually belonged to a project that existed before and was changed into the NSS sting project. Because of this I took this finished storyboard, scrapped the story but kept the initial designs and setting and morphed it into the NSS sting idea. Although this saved me some work and didn't have to start from scratch again, it did mean i needed to go back to the drawing board and refine characters and rethink plot lines.

Finished coloured storyboard that was scrapped

These pages from my sketchbook shown below contain the finished "Chip" design. once i had finished his design I started to draft other characters to accompany him in the piece. Some of them are shown on this page however a few didn't make it as I designed them to go in a storyline I ended up scrapping in favour of a simpler, more solid one. Also shown here are some drafted keyframe poses I would be using in the shots i would be doing. In doing this careful planning of poses it would make it easier when it came to finally animating as I had all the key poses ready to draw and I wouldn't have to waste time thinking as I'm drawing. By the end of the piece these key poses will have changed slightly anyway because of the differences in screen and pages but with the initial poses there I had a strong foundation to work on.

top left: key poses for one of my scenes, bottom left: more key poses, right: page from sketchbook showing final design of "Chip"

 The following pages show my in depth development of "Chip".

top right:key poses for shot 2 showing attitude bottom left:some angled poses for turnaround bottom right:poses for upgrade shots

These are more of the key poses I described before. There are a fair few as I wanted a detailed understanding of how he was going to move in these shots well before I went in and animated them so I chose to refine these key poses quite early on. Also on this page is the first digital version of "Chip". I drew him into Flash using the sketches as a template and also began to think of a colour scheme. I used fairly heavy black lines to outline him as I like to use heavy lines in my style of work, I like to use them almost as a hierarchy so that in my piece it is possible to tell where your attention should be from the thickness of the line round the object or character, I like to use the lines to draw the eye to the action. In terms of colour I wanted to go for a rusted, old feel like he was battered up and on his last legs so I went for the rusty browns and muted colours. I gave him a hint of gold but muted this again into the brown just to give a sense that this robot once was new and sparkly etc but had become worn and old.

top left: key poses top right: close up key poses bottom: digital character sheet for "Chip"

 After developing "Chip" to completion, I then needed to think about some of the ancillary characters that would star in the animation with him whether it be far in the background or part of the action too.

top: character designs for "Camera bot"

colour test for camera bot

It was after experimenting with colour on these designs that I realised colouring my animation in this realistic way was going to kill me to get it in on the deadline and probably wasn't even possible. Therefore I began to start thinking about an alternative way to colour my piece. My design stage however was over and I moved on to the next stage in the pipeline.