Character Designs, Tests and more storyboarding

A the end of last week we had a meeting were I was able to share some of the shots and ideas that I had for the story board and I had also shared these rough character designs. Although again, Anna couldn't make it - we decided to discuss something she had brought up on the group blog about our mime being invisible. She was wondering how we should show features like the eyes, inside of the mouth and tongue. She a said -

'I thought a way of solving that could be starting off with a regular man who puts on a face with creams and crayons. In the process of miming and as he is being ignored his make-up is turnt into a mask that he breaks to reveal an invisible face. He has disappeared'

I'm not sure I understand what this would ultimately convey through the story telling but it would perhaps be clearer if Anna story boarded it out.

My feeling about the issue were similar to Bev's thoughts on the matter, in that that our mime is so neglected and ignored he becomes invisible (quite literally). In the end Bev had suggested that If nothing more suitable can be devised we may just have to run with it and as long as we have a rationale we can back up our decisions.

During the rest of the meeting, Bev and Amy had given me some positive feedback on my story board and both suggested that I continue on with it while they tackle the character designs. I said I was happy to do so and suggested that they make their best attempts to draw their characters in character, from interesting angles. Then their character's poses can potentially be used as key poses for the storyboard or actual panels themselves, that way we'd all still be working on it. After the meeting, Bev had summarised what was discussed on the group blog.







These are quite useful poses I found on the net that I had in my reference archive, they seem to simplify the human figure in ways that perhaps makes drawing and posing figures an easier task. I decide to share this with the group in hope that it might help them with their designs. Although our group has been sharing character designs, there isn't anything I can really use to feed directly in to the storyboarding yet -

Amy had shared some quite dynamic poses that she may have referenced from images except I don't feel that they're key poses that really tackle the exercises in the brief, which is what I am in need of and what I feel we need to work on first.


Click here to see Amy's character poses/designs


Bev seems to be on the right track - She has done a few sketches of the mime doing a rope pulling act, using central arching lines that seem to help determine the balance and weight of her figure. It's also really good to see her attempting to drawing the sequence of the action that she's is trying to draw.

Please click here to view some of Bev's drawings

However, Anna has not shared any designs as of yet.

On that note I decided to share some videos I found on youtube from a collection of videos called 'how to draw the Marvel way' (Marvel comics). These videos talk about the figure posing techniques above in a lot more depth. They describe the steps/processes that the Marvel comic book artist can go through to ensure that they produce the most dynamic poses for their comic book characters. I personally think these are great videos to have to reference and learn from.

I had also shared a line test I had done with the group of  someone pulling on a lead, which seems to work ok. Even though it's pretty rough, the information is there.

Please click here to watch line test

Meanwhile, I was starting to think about how we needed a location in our animation, and I couldn't think were to situate it. Bev had recently uploaded some rough drawings of our mime in two different scenes where background people past him by during his act. She had said she was thinking aboutmaking the sene more prominent, perhaps by dipping the street lights around our mime, to maybe indicate that he once had the lime light.  

Click here for Bev's post.

Seeing her drawings and reading her comments had actually helped me think more a about staging and  I liked the idea of conveying our mime as a stage act. I then started thinking about maybe portraying the character in large square where people could surround him as he performs his acts. 

This was the kind of thing I had in mind, these large squares are quite common in France and sometimes large markets fill these empty spaces. I shared these with the others on the group blog and asked for their thoughts or to even help provide similar examples.

Bev managed to find a lot more examples and created a facebook photo album so that we could reference them which is really helpful, here are a few of those images.

Anna was actually thinking of perhaps situating the act near a café with an outdoor seating area, something that these kind of squares are often surrounded by. So perhaps this location Might be quite fitting. I'm also quite fond of the interesting old architecture found in these images,they could influence the design of our scenes.