AD203 Character Design

Righto
My idea so far:
The concept I was working on over the last month or two is to create a fictitious style documentary (mocumentary). I wanted to create a character that I could put into many situations and tackle many different types of animation including more diagrammatic animations (which is maybe due to the lure of my graphic design past). I certainly would also like to create a 3D character that I can interact with live footage.

So the above to me was the most important part of my brief to me. The 3 minute animation would then hopefully be a good show real on it's own showing a diverse range of animation techniques, although it will be important to make the whole animation gel as one piece of art.

Character design
What I have in mind for the main character is something akin to that of the mocumentary 'Doomed' which features a number of useless and bizarre looking characters. As I've generally produced slightly dark looking animations throughout year one, my aim in year two is to create something a little lighter and maybe something that could be considered 'commercial'. Yet still retaining a little bizarreness.

Below is my style board for my character design research, there are a number of intriguing characters by a collection of artists working for Imaginism Studios which are along the right lines, they have a way of combining a number of existing animals to create new creatures, i also want to place this character in real life situations similar to that of the 'Baboiles' animations.

Style of animation
The idea I had for the style of animation began with influences from the 'Doomed' animation that was shown at the Berlin Pictoplasma festival this year combined with the info animations in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy with regards to descriptive diagrammatic presentation and a short series of animated 'documentaries' featuring James May of all people called 'Things You Need Know...' which is kind of Gilliam-esq in it's use of cut out animation.

Initial sketches and ideas
It was difficult to know where to start with this, I have already created a long back story which is handy as I can use this to create the narrative for the narrator which will essentially be the basis for the script. Initial sketches were quite random, the character could literally be any shape or form the only restriction (set up by me) was to keep it relatively simple so that it would be easy to animate and create in several formats. I'm still working on and developing an animation which has progressed from last year with complex (for me) mouth and expression morphs which will match dialogue I've yet to record, so I've effectively ticked that box and would like to keep this one simple.

I quite loved the idea of a simple useless looking creature that was like a suction cup (the pointy hat looking thing middle right in the sketches above) that would struggle and struggle to pull itself free from the ground and eventually pop away from the ground only to get stuck on the ceiling and this would be the way it got around, very slowly. A bit like one of those toys you push down on a spring and wait to pop up.

After a series of weird experiments the result is somewhat like a elongated space hopper that lives by extracting sound through a series of ear holes around its body and using them to convert Carbon-dioxide
into matter in a similar way to plants. Well that's putting it simply.

I'm currently developing it further though and I want to give it some kind of stumpy arms or feelers which might be good for added expression and work out how the internal organs work and look as this is likely to be part of the narrative.