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 - 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 2

In my last post, I said that the below sketch was the design that was really our first solid step forwards for our short film. 

However, we still made a few tweaks to the design. Pepe seemed weak and small, but he'd lost a little bit of his "clown-ness." I brought back in the bowler hat and flower. Eventually, we lost the cutoff gloves in favor of what I now think of as "Mickey Mouse" gloves. It just added that extra level of cartoony, which was becoming increasingly important as the story was becoming more and more ridiculous (in a good way).

In my 1st round of sketches for any project, I don't always stick to a standard three quarters standing pose. It doesn't always describe the personality enough, plus it gets boring if you're doing several variations. However, I do end up doing some kind of standing pose eventually, so I can create a lineup to compare all my iterations and those of my artists in a lineup.

Before settling on the far right sketch, my director had me check out just how fat we could make our clown and still keep him appealing. Once we'd chosen a character with a scrawny neck, it became necessary to make his "fatness" match his natural physique from before his body went to crap -  a little pot belly became the solution.

Once I had an approved linework sketch, it was time to move on to color. I knew that I wanted red to be the dominant punch color, but I was less sure of the rest of the costume. It was kind of tricky, since clowns are so multi-colored, and mimes are made up entirely of black and white. No matter what color I picked, the clown would always dominate the screen over the mime.

For a little while, I worked with solid colors. I worked with variations of green compliments, but it didn't feel quite right.

Yellow, blue, and red. The primaries.

 Blue stripes and orange.

 Blue and white stripes and orange. I was testing out scarf colors too.

 I really wanted green to work...

By this time, I'd found that white stripes added a necessary level of complexity to the torso, but also broke up the power of whatever the shirt color was without adding a new color.

A clean and dirty version. We ended up going with the clean version since our beginning events were simplified to get the story moving, but also because excessive dirt and grime was distracting and dampened the colors a bit.

Eventually, I returned to primary colors. I think the reason that some of my earlier explorations didn't work was the addition of the secondary or tertiary colors. When I had worked with just primaries, the amount of each color was pretty even. I had thought that bringing in red to more than just the head would be too much and too monochromatic, but it felt just right, with blue being the second dominant color and a dash of yellow for the scarf. Easy right? In my next post, I'll upload the other clown option that we almost went with, but still kind of did.

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.