Character Design and Backgrounds
On Friday our group started on character design. We made a list of our characters which consisted of Mary, the robots, and the townspeople. We had decided for the robots that we should have two slightly different uniforms for them depending on their ranking, as we had robots in the town and then more important robots guarding Mary herself. We also had to look at the storyboard to figure out how many townspeople we would need.
I decided to do the townspeople and also work on the town backgrounds. To me the two most prominent townspeople are the character ringing the bell and the character holding the crowd back from the robots later on. I decided to work on these two first.
Because we had been looking at Le Misérables as a references for the townspeople clothing Yvonne recommended that I look up the costume designer for that, and see what they were referencing. The costume designer for that was Paco Delgado, and I found an interview where he said that he used paintings by Goya, Delacroix, Jacques-Louis David and Ingres as references. I looked at those artists too to see what people were wearing.
I ended up using the painting "Liberty leading the people" for two characters costumes. I had to be mindful though of how French these paintings were, so I tried to make them a bit more ambiguous but I don't know if I succeeded.
This is the development of the two "main" townspeople:
These are the other townspeople, I only designed their upper-half's as there aren't any shots where their lower legs can be seen.
I found it really difficult to alter my own style to fit with the reference. "The Animatrix: Beyond" has a semi-realistic style that I tried to imitate but it was really hard.
I then looked at designing a background for the town. I took a shot from the storyboard, where the crowd is gathering in the town to revolt against Mary.
I tried to make the buildings look a bit steampunk-y with different patterns that you wouldn't see in the actual 1800s. I also tried to make them look a bit more run-down with some destruction on the buildings. I might try and re-create this digitally to neaten it a bit.
I started working on a second storyboard today using our current visuals. We're only going to detail and colour the key shots for now.
This is the first shot, of the castle above the town:
This is the shot of the townspeople seeing the robots in front of the castle.