Jubilee Pool - Initial Character Designs

I started off the character designs for the Jubilee Pool project by exploring animal characters. We had talked to the clients about if they wanted human or animal characters, and they were interested in us exploring animals. I also wanted the film to reach out to a younger target audience, especially children, so animals would be a good route to go down.

I didn't want to make really complicated designs, since we had to animate them and we already had quite complex backgrounds in terms or texturing. I used very basic shapes as the bases for these designs, and worked on them to create characters with reference to British Wildlife animals - more appropriate for the location of the film. Robin had the idea of the Military character being a large grumpy cat, and we all really liked this idea so I explored it in my sketches.

I also did this very quick concept piece for our presentation to the clients to see if they liked these kind of designs and colours. They really liked them and the ideas we had, but we felt like these characters were a little too simple and they needed bigger personalities, so we did some redesigning.

So here is a collection of all our designs we did. (by me, Robin and Drew) We liked the body shape and elements from my cat design, and Drew resigned my fox for the main character, Mark. We chose which characters we preferred and I created a lineup of them. We still felt like there were elements we didn't like, but overall we had a collection of designs which were alright. We still needed to figure out the colours and how it fitted with the background, which I chose to explore.