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 - A long road to find the right mime - Part 2

Since the chemistry between the clown and the mime was so important and they would take up the most screen time, I constantly compared them as I developed the mime character. For a while, I lined them up with both of the clown final designs to see if one resonated better than the other. The mime had a bit of a tom boy look in many of my designs as well as some of the other artists who tackled her. It was tricky to keep her sex a question. A lot of it came with hiding the hips somehow and exploring nose options. Eventually, a combination of some of the concepts led to the most sinewy and graceful character you see in the film, but a lot of exploration still went into the face even after it was clear we had the right body type.

As you can see, I created variations for the mouth, the nose, the eyes, and the eyebrows. If the clown was an explosive angry character, the mime needed to be a calm, graceful, centered character. Someone above it all. A consummate professional. The height difference made her seem a little more mature as well as making the clown seem a little more harmless.

The biggest twist in "Pepe and Lucas" is the reveal toward the end that the mime is actually a woman who hides her huge red clown hair underneath a hat, an element the clown finds irresistible. Different hairstyles seemed to work on different characters, but always the goal was to make the hair loud and colorful, something that would have to be hidden away in order for the audience to be able to focus on her performance. That visual connection created by that stop sign red color as well as the pure size adds to the sudden realization for the clown that he may have something in common with his antagonist after all.

It seemed insignificant when I started, but I played around with the number of painted on lashes. The one horizontal lash and one vertical tear below the eye were pretty traditional, but filling in that space with two extra lashes added just a touch more of femininity to the character to help strike that super delicate balance.
I still played around with the mouth too. Getting that one perfect pose and expression is so key to identifying the core of a character to the rest of the Brain Zoo team is painstaking. I usually only go about 1 to 3 iterations beyond that one sketch that feels right, but the mime was a much more hidden character. Even the smile was tricky. It needed to be confident and self-assured without being egotistical. It needed to be a little sly since she knows something we don't, but not smug. As you've seen the nose was a triangle wedge shape for a long time. I'd hoped to create a nose that was opposite to the clown's since the mime essentially represents an opposite, but the nose was so bold looking and what we needed was something smoother and graceful, so I ended up introducing a slight swoop to it.

Final mime design. Lucas.

Final mime design with hair exposed.

Once the mime was finally chosen, I sketched a few more mimes, since having really solidified what the mime represented for the film, a lot of my previous creations seemed unrelated and we didn't know at the time if we'd see other performers or if "Pepe and Lucas" would be a recurring short film project for us.

Pepe and Lucas - A long road to find the right mime - Part 1

The mime was the most challenging character to develop. It was established early on that she would be the clown's love interest, but it was important that her femininity be disguised to allow for an "ah hah" moment at the end. In terms of personality, if the clown was a bumbling slob, she would be a graceful intellectual. He would use very industrial technology for his gadgets and props. She would be able to create whatever was in the limits of her imagination, but always with a futuristic bent. Primitive past vs. Advanced Future. This early on, we hadn't established the world much or how much action/comedy/romance there would be. We wanted to establish a new style for our characters and a unique look for our mime.

 A more action contemporary take. Our "invisibility" effect for the objects she conjures ended up looking like glass or the Predator's invisibility cloak, but I still think a 2D dashed outline would have been fun too. At the outset of the project, I had in mind a much more slapstick kind of comedy/action, like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and I ended up bringing in some of those classic elements - I gave the characters those iconic white gloves with 3 stripes on them. Originally, the Clown had a giant wooden mallet too. In early storyboards, I had the pupils of the eyes swap out for words and pictures of what they were thinking. The Clown also uses a white surrender flag at the climax of his battle with the Mime. I never got too classic cartoony with the Mime since I worked on her later in development, but there's s couple of Clown designs that definitely feel like they're right out of some early WB cartoons.

 When you're spitballing, it's not all gold.

 Art Deco motifs and stylings of that era were provided as a starting point for this project. Not much of that made it into the final designs, but it did generate some of the most unique designs for the Mime. I found that in order to have a mime still read as a mime, you can only adjust a few elements. The costume cannot be complex since all of the acting must be in the facial expressions. A really strong, simple silhouette is key to create solid, legible poses and you can see this simplicity applied to most real life mime costumes. Complex patterns tend to distract the eye from the movements. You'll see in later poses that I had to pull back on the patterns and weirder costume elements.

 I loved this one since it came out so unexpectedly weird. It's like a robot, toy mime splashed with an abstract painting.

 Ninja mime.

 The gentle giant.

An ice cream cone meets a bell hop.

None of these made it to the second round as sometimes happens, and lot more designs were to follow. These were just a little too out there. Stay tuned for the fine tuning of the mime character in the next post.

"Pepe and Lucas" short film.

Hi Everyone! After a year of work, BrainZoo Studios is proud to present our new short film "Pepe and Lucas"! We even made the long list for the Academy Short Films category! I was lucky enough to work on this project almost uninterrupted as art director, lead concept artist, and storyboard artist. Working on a story from start to finish was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences I've had as an artist and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of this project.

Concepts and storyboards to come soon!