Part IV: Creating a Planet

After deciding on a project direction for my little robots, and creating a cast of supporting characters, I started all of my pre-planning to create the additional elements I would need to adequately animate things. As I stated in Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys, I had a loose idea of how I wanted these characters to move but I had done no further work on it at that point. I have had very little character animation experience at the time, so the entire process was very new to me.

My first step was to create some models with different views so I would know what these guys looked like from a few angles. I had only created one point of view at this point and needed to explore some rough rotations, so I created these studies:

I wanted the animation to be pretty simple, where I could create loops, still frames and effects I could easily use with tweens in Flash. Nothing new, but I thought it would look nice seeing the scenes I created using such bold colors come to life.

In order to understand just how versatile these guys were, I did a couple of animation tests using the old and revised versions of the Brothers. I had to figure out how many pieces I would require when looping and rotating the characters, not all that different then the kind of animation used on my favorite web cartoon, Homestar Runner. So, I went about creating a few animated tests in Flash, click the images below to check them out:

After spending a few weeks prepping these character designs and animation tests, I set about solidifying back stories, mapping out more realized plot lines, and the daunting task of storyboarding out all of my ideas. I had to see how everything fit together before I started creating the animation for characters and backgrounds, so I spent a great deal of time roughing up thumbnails to analyze the flow and to make sure things moved intuitively.

This is where I hit an impasse. I was looking at the various animation tasks ahead and began to feel buried under a project that had started out on a small scale but had steadily grown as I explored the designs, the story, and my potential as an animator. As much fun as these characters and environments were to design, it was time to move on to the brooding production work that lied ahead . . . and it started to look a bit grim.

Next up . . . Part V: A New Start

Need to catch up on the previous parts in A Signalnoise Odyssey? Be sure to check out:

Part I: A Long Time Ago…
Part II: Rise of the Brothers
Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys

Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys

After creating the main character concepts (see Part I) as well as refining the design in vector format (see Part II), I was now at a critical point in the project which was mapping out exactly how I wanted it executed, in what medium, and what additional elements or characters I needed to create.

While designing, I had been loosely thinking about what the characters might look like in motion with different scenes, angles and poses. So I decided my little alien robots would be the lead characters in a little online animation project, maybe webisodes or a few short films. I would write and animate everything in Flash with some painterly backgrounds, an ambitious but fun little project I simply dubbed The Planet.

With that decision made, I set about writing some basic outlines for plots and stories I thought would be fun to work on. As the story grew I started adding more characters into the mix to foil, and be foiled by, the Brothers. These additional characters got further flushed out as I bounced ideas off of friends for plot ideas, and I eventually started the design process to see what these guys looked like.

The first was the main bad guy, the Coyote to my little Roadrunners, who I wanted to resemble a small spoiled child. His name is Ikaru:

Darth Vader had his Stormtroopers, and I wanted Ikaru to have his own posse of minions to do his dirty work:

And a race of super-intelligent robo-beings I simply named The Elders. Nobody knows whose side the Elders are on:

And what bad guy would be complete with a castle lair where he can plot the demise of his unsuspecting enemys? As a kid, I always loved how elaborate the villains’ hideouts always were, so here is a concept design for Ikaru’s castle:

My overall goal for creating a cast of characters was to not only make them unique from each other, but paying strict attention to how they looked as a whole. Styles can change, but they needed to look consistent as a group to enforce they were from the same universe, or planet in this case. I have been drawing cartoons my whole life, but with this project I was concentrating on applying my design abilities to keep things as consistant as I possibly could.

So at this point I had a more explored idea of the band of characters that inhabited The Planet, and a good idea of how they interacted to one another based on their archetypes. It was then time to move from the conceptual stage and into some pre-visualization and storyboarding based on the storylines I had come up with, and the trials that come with it.

Next up . . . Part IV: Creating a Planet

Part II: Rise of the Brothers

Here is the second part of A Signalnoise Odyssey, a series of posts where I’m outlining a project I started 3 years ago, the processes involved, and where the endeavor has led.

After drawing my little robot character for a week or so (seen in Part I: A Long Time Ago…), I naturally started to build up his personality in my head while expanding on some design ideas. I started thinking about his purpose, an environment he might reside in, and ultimately what his origins might be. I always saw him wandering about a forest on a distant planet, which sounds like a lonely existence for such a little guy, but more about that later.

My next step was to move into Illustrator and sharpen things up. I always do a first vector version quickly to nail down posture and expression in a very 2D manner using basic shapes, which led to this version of the little robot:

The funnest part of making this very rough version was messing around with the floral design on his torso. Offsetting it over his arm, imagining what it might look like in rotation, the variety of different styles I could pursue, etc. A lot of fun was to be had.

Over the next few days I started moving the design into something a bit more 3-dimensional still using strict vectors and basic shapes while continuing to experiment with floral designs from various dingbat sets I downloaded. As I said earlier, I imagined this little guy in a fairly lonely existence which is pretty unfair :) But through experimenting with the new design and different patterns, the Brothers were born.

I nudged the design more in the direction of my initial concept sketches while trying to maintain the posture, expression and general silliness of the flat vector version.

So what started as a little sketch had grown into a little band of forest-dwelling robots. But the obvious question was what did the forest look like? I wanted something simple to compliment the shapes of the Brothers, but it needed to be alien enough to make it distinctive from anything found on earth. I opted for the biggest different being expressed through color, which set me free to design a simple environment for the Orange Forest where the Brothers could peacefully go about their business.

I first painted things out quickly in Photoshop…

… then moved into Illustrator to clean things up and design the landscape around the characters.

I had been watching a lot of Samurai Jack at the time, and the Asian style Tartakovsky used for his background designs had an influence on what I wanted to achieve.

Things were now starting to take some shape, but I had still done very little planning as to what the Brothers actually were, what they did in the forest, where they came from and ultimately what I saw this project becoming. Every character needs a good backstory to give them purpose, so for the next several weeks I set about exploring the orange world where the Brothers lived and what they might encounter along the way.

Next up . . . Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys