Telling Tales: Discussing Ideas

Now that we had narrowed down our ideas down to just the two, it was time to choose one to continue working with. Emma and I were unsure of which to go for as both ideas had potential, so I suggested that we do a bit of character design to see if this would influence our decision.

So we got started. I began by looking a child designs:

Child Designs

When drawing the child character I wanted to try and keep it as simple as possible. The first face I drew (Top left) was much too detailed yet also quite uncanny, so I swerved away from trying to make it look human but instead just gave the face human characteristics. I tried to do this with the body also (with the exception of my one "realistic" baby) and dressed the child in a onesie so details like toes are hidden.

Having looked at both my own initial drawings and Emma's we were no closer to deciding on which idea we preferred, so I decided to run our ideas by Matt to see what he thought. He told me that both the ideas were fine and he likes the sound of them both, but he also mentioned that the pushing and pulling of the characters that we were planning on in our first idea (Small character dragging Tall character to "Nowhere") might be a bit harder to do, but would still be do-able.

As much as we liked the idea, in the end we decided against Road to Nowhere. We thought it'd be best to go for the Parent and Child narrative as it was already going to be challenging enough to create and animate our models, without the added difficulty of trying to work out how we were going to make the characters interact successfully (pushing against one another). Emma also suggested that we completely avoid making the characters human as they may be difficult to model, especially the face. I took Emma's suggestion on board when I did some further sketches for potential characters.

Parent and Child Design

I thought the characters could be robotic, as I thought they would be interesting yet easy to replicate in Maya as they are just made up of shapes. I quite like this as an idea, as the parent can be presented as being more developed by having working fingers, where as the child is much smaller and could have a mitten like hand. However, I am still going to continue with further designs to see which would work the best.