Production Arts for Screen BA (Hons)
My initial idea for "Who's behind the door" project was to create an existing animal and give some backstory to it to make it stand out to the audience. Animals are quite diverse and personification is used in many ways in animation and film production. My main sources of inspiration became "Secret life of pets" and "Cats & Dogs" movies, where animals, pets specifically, are given professions, which have me an idea of creating an animal as a spy.
Lectures on character creation helped a lot during concept creation since, from unexperienced point of view, my intuition was to make as complex and detailed character possible, however, simple and obvious characters are more believable. It is easier to connect to a character, whose image is easy to understand.
My final idea was to make a spy cat. Spies are associated with agility and secrecy, which aligns with cats' traits quite a lot. From my perspective, a combination of a cat and a spy in one character is a symbiosis where both images highlight the best in each other.
Firstly, I wanted to explore different breeds of cats and how the differences in those could interact with an image of the spy. Giving that cat anatomy is mostly the same in spite of the breed, it still impacts its color, coat and temper, stereotypes of which could be used in favour of creating and pushing certain idea. Oriental cats were the first for me to explore. Something special about this breed is its huge ears mostly. Besides, it has elongated face and limbs. I immediately thought of how those traits could be used to portray the spy - long ears to eavesdrop, long limbs to climb everywhere needed.
Then my intention was to explore a breed which was drastically different - Persian. This breed differs by having extra fluffy coat, flat face and stereotypically mean and not friendly temper. In this case I thought of how this type of spy cat could use their tail to wipe evidence and clues away; how contrast of having a heavy round-shaped cat be a spy, which is associated with something entirely different.
First three images represent my exploration into cat anatomy, since my idea was to create a character which is a cat of a special breed - oriental cat. Cats on their own are very unique creatures, its flexibility is phenomenal and that is why it was very important for me to understand what its skeleton looks like, how it functions and how the muscles and skin on top of it acts in coordination.
Besides studying and practicing general anatomy of cats, since my character was the oriental cat, it was crucial to identify and analyse specific features of that exact breed. Therefore, I did some extra drawing, exploring who big orientals' ears are, how long the limbs and the face are, since those were the main differences of them from other breeds.
Chimera project
Meanwhile, as part of the introduction to the course, I had a pleasure to work on a small and fast project, which could help to understand the basis of character creation. The task was to use Natural History Museum exhibitions as main source of inspiration and come up with a creature, combining a minimum of 3 elements. As a challenge to myself, I wanted to get inspired from animals, which usually would not draw my attention - that is, not obviously appealing. Pangolins, porcupine and platypus were the main characters in my interpretation of this project.
Working on this project taught me how to quickly come up with concepts and not trying to overcomplicate them. This skills is something that I tried to transferred to "Who's behind the door" project since generating a lot of ideas in a short span of time is an essential industry skills.
Movement for Character Design - workshop
A workshop "Movement for character design" was taught by a professional dancer, who had a lot of experience in body movement and language.