Pepe and Lucas - The Clown Car - A prop full of props.

As the action heated up in Pepe and Lucas, we introduced Pepe's clown car. Originally, the battle would have had a few more levels of escalation. Pepe would have begun battle with a mallet, then used a small canon, then a gigantic pie launching canon, followed by the clown car, then maybe transformed into a mech to do battle with the mech the mime would imagine. However, all that action would have added several minutes and would have really upset the pacing. After all, we originally intended to have something shorter in the 5 minute range and we still ended up with something in the 8 minute range. We pared down the action scenes but kept the climactic battle where the clown, as a last resort uses a clown car to challenge the mime. The mime, not to be outdone, mimes a robot mech, and they do battle. 

By the time the clown introduces the clown car, the weapons each character uses have progressed from the standard props associated with clowns and mimes to something that might fit right into a scifi movie. The clowns car was designed like the tiny car we're all familiar with , but it would have tons of Inspector Gadget arms holding various clown weapons so it would literally be "armed to the teeth." When I started designing it, the pie launcher was still a go, so I used another food weapon and introduced an egg firing gatling gun. To make it more ridiculous, I added a chicken to man the gun. We tried a range of cars to see what would look most natural in our evolving environment and story. I spent a fair amount of time trying ideas inspired by 40's, 50's and 60's European cars. I new it needed to have a touch of old world European nostalgia and by this time I was looking at a lot of vintage toys when designing for the clown. Looking at toys or models of an era is a great way to see how things have been simplified and stylized to their essence, but still maintain an element of fun. It was important to be inspired by reality, but not just to stylize reality, but to make it fit the alternative world we developed. I eventually settled on a VW Bug inspired look, but the element that finally clinched it for me was when I drew the bumper around the entire car. It looked just like a bumper car. A bumper car totally epitomized the rough banging around and jerky movements I imagined for Pepe's transportation.

I did a fair number of color variations for the car that would have matched Pepe's outfit, but it seemed to be better to have the car feel like a separate item with it's own color set. I kept the yellow from the scarf, but introduced the green compliment to really keep the focus on Pepe's head.

One of the few times I've had to design the underside of something.

Each element that popped out of the car needed an explanatory drawing.

It almost wasn't worth designing the balls, since that's a standard design and color set for actual juggling balls, but they were primary colors and it worked with Pepe's clothing colors. Since we were stylizing so much, and wear and tear and grunge were so much a part of the Pepe's identity, I paid special attention to the rust patches and dinks on the car as well as on the juggling balls. I wanted those touches to still retain a graphic quality to them, often so that they could look worn without losing some of the color vibrancy you might get from introducing smudges and dirt.

The chicken body didn't require much exploration, but I did take some time to work on the eyes and see if they should look more animal or more intelligent. Somewhere in there a Prussian helmet entered the fray.

Of course a clown car can fit buckets of other clowns in it, but in Pepe's situation, they're all robot clones of himself that work in unison to overpower the mime.

And that is how the task of designing one prop became a the task of developing several props. ;)

Pepe and Lucas - Character Model Sheets.

Character model sheets are my least favorite part of concept designing, but they are really important. Obviously, the modelers use them to build a model of your concept, but I find that it also reveals more fully to me what the 3 dimensional shapes are that make up my design.

As I have constantly found from working with 3D artists, there's always room for interpretation of a 2D design and when you work in 2D, there are a lot of short cuts that an artist takes that only work as an abstraction of reality. The way the eyes wrap around the head is often a place that where my front and side view drawings don't match up once modeled in 3D. I usually give the eyeballs much more mass from the side than would actually appear if my front view is matched. You can see the disjoint in Inspector Clousseau examples below. Check out the eyeball in the 2D profile shot. There's a solution in the 3D toy on the right, but you can see that the nose had to to be moved in order to make room for both eyes to sit together. That shift pulls the nose over the mouth as a result.

A lot of anatomical impossibilities will come up in 3D that must be worked out and agreed upon with the modelers, but working out the basic shapes of a character with abstracted anatomy really saves a modeler some time and ensures that the character looks like what I had in mind, from all sides. I've often been told by my 3D buddies that a three quarter view describes the most of any view, but it isn't nearly as helpful from a modeling stand point. Proportions in a 3/4 perspective can't be judged as accurately.

For the magician, the hair ended up being the part that needed extra explanation.

The clown also needed some hair explanation since a hat covered the top of the head, but there was a gag planned where it would pop off when he burst into a fit of rage. I'd done a painting of him with a total afro eluding to the possibility that there was a whole mess of hair tucked into that little bowler. That joke was cut, but it would have affected how the hair was created.

Since I'd drawn Pepe from the front and not in three quarters, I found that a lot of people had mistaken the scarf around his neck to be a collar, even with the scarf tails hanging down his back.

Making the nose fit on his face without intersecting the eyes was a challenge in 3D. We had to play with flattening the eye and adding/reducing the bridge of the nose. It also became a little bit of a legibility issue since it was large enough that it often covered up the eye farthest from the camera.

Since we were simulating real clothing, it was necessary to paint the characters naked so the modeler's could see the body forms hidden by baggy clothing and make sure the cloth bent and folded around those particular shapes. That didn't end up necessary for the mime since her clothing was so form fitting.

For the most part, no character had a really intricate or unexpected backside, but without the drawing of the mime, a modeler wouldn't have known I wanted to cross the suspenders.

Pepe and Lucas - The Clown who would be Clown.

Spoiler Alert: this guy is the evil Magician.

It was a difficult choice to make, but this guy was determined to be a little less of a perfect fit for our protagonist. At that point, the story had lost the Magician as a main character, but later my director introduced him at the end of the short as an easter egg - the villain who might threaten Pepe and Lucas' happiness and new found success. The body shapes and silhouette still worked very well within the style of the other two main characters, so we gave him a wardrobe and personality change. In retrospect, I think the key to this character's success is that hair. It works even better as a dome of greasy, evil guy hair.

I still went through a thorough exploration of color palettes with this clown.

Eventually, red became the unifying color for this clown's design, just like with the design we ended up using. As you can see, I kept the tie white for most of the exploration, but as I was adding more and more red to the other clown design, I did the same for this guy.

I think the one element that made this guy just a little less perfect, was that he feels more contemporary. The colors are a little modern too, especially the neon greens, but even the design of the clothes elements feels like something you might see on a clown today.

I love doing expression sheets. It helps flesh out the character personality, but with highly stylized characters, it's particularly valuable to see how your character's expressions and movements work with abstracted body forms. I didn't hear any complaints about this character when we modeled him as the Magician, but he only had a little screen time. The other final Clown design caused some concerns because the nose was much higher on the face and often blocked out a lot of the eyes when we saw him from the front, which caused us to adjust the design in 3D to make his eye movements a little more legible.

Pepe and Lucas - Making the Clown Part 1.

The first step we took to begin "Pepe and Lucas" was to develop the main characters - the mime, the magician, and the clown. We only had a brief description of the story events and the world and it essentially boiled down to 3 street performers with different abilities who compete/fight for money/fight for the audience's attention. It would take place in a stylized world made up of entertainers living in an entertainment-centric environment. None of the "races" of entertainers would get along and would have constant turf battles, like the Sharks and the Jets from "West Side Story". There'd be outrageous battles, fight scenes, chases, comedy, and a romantic angle. My director wanted something nostalgic calling back to the days of vaudeville and the art deco era. Basically, the western world in the 1920's through 1940's. Other than that, it was pretty much a blue sky situation, which was fantastic. 

Each character presented it's own unique challenge since the story was still in development, but the clown was perhaps the most challenging in that he would do the most changing and had to be the most appalling character at the beginning, but the most appealing by the end. We needed a character who was down-and-out, a slob, desperate for attention, and starving for success. He would be embittered by fading memories of success and essentially would have fallen in the world to the point of embodying the stereotype of an "angry drunk clown".

 A lot of my initial sketches featured the clown drinking or drunk and usually very fat and slovenly. It seemed impossible to empathize with this character and I realized that I had been working backwards. If you draw an unappealing character, you get an unappealing character. I started drawing the clown with both his angry/bitter face and also his revitalized hero face so I could make sure he worked on both sides of the personality spectrum.

 I also found very quickly, that while a fat slob version of the clown could be very pathetic, making him short and stocky or tall and heavy always made him look a little too dangerous or too thuggish. It would  look like someone who could really intimidate with their body weight, and that wouldn't demonstrate the kind of emotional or physical weakness we needed. I started drawing a lot of smaller, petite characters to offset that element. I realized that I needed someone small enough that they would not be a physical threat to anyone, someone aware of their size who would be much more prone to emotional outbursts. Essentially, a child with anger issues. Maintaining a small stature was important and to bring in physical weakness, I started reducing the size of the chins, making bigger heads and scrawnier necks.

 This guy made it to the final round, although he went through some revisions as you'll see.

 This is the sketch that eventually led to the final design. I didn't do a happy version of this because I knew I had it. It's the only drawing where I drew a sad clown. I had been so focused on the "angry" drunk stereotype, that I never considered drawing someone in despair.

 I was running out of steam here :)

Looking back on these designs, I remember that I explored both European clown costumes and history as well as American style clown costumes and history. Even though many elements of the clown costume don't change over time - big shoes, wig, face paint, baggy clothes, and of course the red nose, the clown more than any of the other characters felt right in a more American style, depression era costume. You'll see in a later post that I created full color clean and dirtied versions of the characters. I found that a clown with a more contemporary look or color palette or European dress didn't read as "broken" when dirtied up, just dirty. His patches were the patches of a clown costume, not the patches of a life hard fought. The hobo clown look of the American Depression said so clearly that this was as good as it got. It really represented his economic position in life. In the end that was sufficient and we didn't end up texturing him dirty for the short. It also seemed less like a costume and more like someone's day to day wardrobe. The nostalgia of that time also made the clown feel much more like a forgotten person who hadn't seen a good day in a long time, like he was permanently stuck in the gutters.

In my next post, I'll load up the color steps we took to bring Pepe to a full color finished character concept.