Pepe and Lucas - The People, The Monument, and some birds.

In doing research for Pepe and Lucas, we looked at a lot of short films for ideas on pacing, story, and how "big" to make it. One of the things I've noticed with shorts is that there's usually only 2 to 3 characters involved in the main action and rarely a lot of characters, let alone a city of bystanders. Look at how Pixar's One Man Band and Presto both starred entertainers putting on a show, but with few onlookers or with an implied audience. Budget is obviously a consideration, but too many side characters can pull you away from the main drama. One thing that I've noticed about most short films is that with so little time, they tend to feel very immediate. So, we started off with the idea that we'd never really get a good look at our pedestrians and that the cameras would avoid them for the most part. They'd be blurred silhouettes of generic models with jackets and hats. However, like so many projects, you can't always control how they develop if you want to put in your best effort. The story department realized early on that we couldn't avoid showing people. Unlike Presto, we weren't sitting in the dark with the audience and because of the nature of the entertainment duel, there weren't the typical pauses for an audience to make clapping or cheering noises. As the battle heated up and the clown and mime started chasing each other with increasing amounts of destruction, people needed to get out of the way. It was most obvious in an early scene when the clown enters the square. Without people, how would we know that the mime was more popular than the clown? No matter how we scaled up or down the square, it always looked huge. Even with the giant monument I created for the center and trees and lamp posts and outdoor restaurant seating, with just two characters it just looked massive. There needed to be people to give us an accurate sense of scale. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that we would have to populate it with more people - pedestrians walking in the background, even an occasional car, and a crowd in the foreground.  As a result we needed designs for models, but within a limited time and budget. As you can see below, I did several sketches for men and women based on the mime's anatomy so that we could reutilize the model and rig as well as keep the same stylized anatomy. However, even those changes were a little too drastic and eventually, I painted over the mime and the clown and gave them different hair, mustaches and different clothes, but left the actual anatomy untouched. We also drew upon other stylized characters we've created for other internal projects and gave them new wardrobes and hair.

The Bartender. He had a much bigger part in the original storyline, but is almost entirely hands in the final version. Another victim of the crunch, we used a differently proportioned model to build off of  and I brought over as many of the most important traits as I could. In the end it worked out just fine since we only ever see the hands anyways and they remained huge and menacing.

The Monument. As I mentioned earlier, we needed to fill the square a little bit so the background behind the clown and mime had some visual interest. My research into monuments led me to a lot of obelisk type forms that were tall and thin. However, most of our shots are at about eye level looking at the horizon, so all we ever saw was the base or a thin pole in the distance. This led me to shorten and squash the proportions. Everything became wider and the equestrian figure mounted at the top much larger in scale. You can actually see it in several shots.

 

I paid homage to one of Brain Zoo's original short film character's Percy by making him the figure of power atop the monument. I found a few places to place the Brain Zoo logo on the there as well as the manholes on the streets and even on the coinage. As soon as the clown car was approved, chickens became a much bigger part of the short film, as an element that gets brought in to add an extra level of ridiculousness. It even made it onto the film poster.

Since crowds of people take forever to render and animate, we looked for other sources of movement to add energy to the backgrounds, so I did several designs for city birds. This was one of the last concepts I created and by this time the story was fairly fleshed out. I knew that it needed to fit into this nostalgic, pseudo-European,  cartoony, wonky world that went beyond just mild stylization, so I tried not to make any of them look too recognizable as doves or pigeons. Just birds.

We went with the below design as it had just the right level of ridiculousness.

Pepe and Lucas - The Town Square

The town square was our main environment. We had only one interior, a bar scene that appears in the beginning, and the rest of the film takes place outside on the side streets and in the town square. 

A square environment, the town square was a four sided box lined with various buildings that we'd repeat and vary to populate our town center. I looked at a lot of European towns and squares to gain some inspiration. To get away from just cartooning and stylizing pre-existing architecture, I also checked out some great artists and art such as Dr. Seus, the art for the movie Nocturna, and Shaun Tan's illustration work to name a few. All sources have dealt with densely packed civilizations with a history. All are highly imaginative and tend to have some kind of industrial look too. Pipes and chimneys became a consistent element. The one thing that I wasn't finding in a lot of the Italian and French architecture was brick. The addition of that material  to the buildings really gave the square a nice industrial look like a sturdy place that had seen better times, just like our protagonist.  It became a unifying material as well. A lot of my form language came from Dr. Seus's leaning and swooping buildings. My first couple sketches were always too clean cut and ordered and never made it to completion. By introducing wedge shapes, it made the city seem more dense as if each piece was dropped into place or built in the spare space around and between buildings. Like with the clown's props, my goal was to color the buildings with vibrant colors, but to show that they had a history and weren't in the best shape. Rather than paint dirt on them, I had the top color wear away to reveal older layers of paint underneath. Just like with the clown, white became my unifying color and was used for all the moldings.

This one makes me smile. It was canned pretty quick because it looks so crazy, but the idea was based off the original story thread that three "races" of entertainers  - the clowns, the mimes, and the magicians, all coexisted in this giant city. Each type would have distinguishing symbols, patterns, and colors that would denote who lived where. It might have been a bit much, but the polka dots make me laugh.

The bar interior only has a tiny amount of screen time, but I knew I wanted it to be a real dive. "Real Dive" would have been a good name, but we ended up going with "Smiley's" after the bar owner we designed for it. Smokey and dark and dirty. Not a nice place. No martinis here.

Smiley's bar was located on one of the side streets to the square. It you check out the next image, you can see that it picks up where the above leaves off.  The original story called for the time of day to be magic hour after a rain storm, leaving the ground level in shadow with store lights and street lamps casting bright colorful lights that would get picked up in the puddles and slick streets. I needed to create a different atmosphere for the square  and the side street. The square would be warm, inviting and active, whereas the side street was as lonely and dangerous.  Since we created only a few sets of buildings to be reused over and over, we didn't have a special set just for the back alley with the bar, so I relied heavily on lighting and color with a specific set of props to differentiate the two areas. The square would have warm yellows and oranges for lights, but the back alley would cast greener yellows, greens, and deep reds - a lot of neon lighting. We did add some cans and papers to the street, but the key differentiators in props were that we put the trash out and made sure that trees only lined the square. This made the alley feel a bit more city. We also turned off many of the lights in the windows to make it seem a bit more deserted.

As I just mentioned, we lit the square to be bright and cosy and a little festive. Having the sun low enough to cast most of the pavement in shadow allowed us to really play with display lights and create small areas of interest wherever we wanted. We really pulled from the outdoor lighting in a lot of European cities for this environment, so that the square would just be filled with strings of lights, lamp posts, building lights, and light spilling out from the restaurants and shops.

In the corners on the left and right, the light gets cooler and greener as you leave the comfort of the square.

Pepe and Lucas - The Canon.

I followed much the same principles with the canon as I did with the pie launcher - primary colors, vintage toy inspiration, circus/carnival patterns, and some graphic wear and tear. The one caveat was that the canon needed to have a short enough barrel that Pepe could point it vertically to drop the mime's imagined dog in it.

Pepe and Lucas - The Pie Launcher. It launches pies.

For the most part, when I'm starting work on a project, the 3D team is finishing up another one. When they start on the next project, I've already moved on to the next one after that. This allows me to stay ahead of the curve for the most part, except when several projects are all running at the same time and my brain explodes. However, things worked a little differently for Pepe and Lucas. We took close to a year off to create it from start to finish and I was able to maintain my focus on just that project for almost as long. If you've been following my previous posts, you can see that for the most part the process goes from sketch variations to color variations to finished painting and then orthographic drawings for the modelers. However, since the whole team was moving on the project at the same time, they did catch up to me pretty quickly. As a result, some objects were built out for me entirely and some of the bigger things  were roughly mocked up, so that they could be utilized in early animation stages with the idea that I'd come back later to finalize the design. The pie launcher was one such example.

Modeling by Dan Herrera.

The pie launcher was designed to be the first step in a more scifi direction. As the battle between clown and mime heated up, the props would become more and more fantastic and action oriented. Instead of throwing pies, Pepe's pie launcher rapid fires clips of pies. The pie launcher influences were a combination of WWII weapons of war - battleship turret guns, and then carnival rides and circus canons. I kept the color palette matching Pepe's costume, although you'll also find that primary colors are often the primary colors used in carnival and circus palettes.

While I prefer to do my sketches and paintings before the modeling so I don't waste a modeler's time building an idea that won't fly, it is really nice to have the proportions worked out so that the modeler has a lot less guessing to do. I'm sure I'll be doing more 3D myself in the future, so I can at least do this kind of basic mock up for myself.

One thing I've neglected to mention about creating Pepe's props was that they all needed to feel like technology from the depression era - very industrial, made up of metal and gears and pistons. He's a nuts and bolts kind of guy. His gadgets needed to be as worn and forgotten as him.
The other consideration was the level of wear and tear that would be defined by dirt, grunge, and rust. We ended up not texturing Pepe with the grunge version I'd painted. It just felt like too much. For the most part, we didn't dirty things up too much as I found that it often muddied the colors a lot.  We did add rust and dents to Pepe's mechanical props. Anything that was painted would have chipping paint or paint worn off revealing the prime layer of paint underneath. I tried to use rust sparingly and punched up the color so that it was very vibrant instead of leaning towards black or brown. Especially on the car, I looked for ways to place it so that it would lead your eye back up to Pepe's head. You can see these principals applied to the pie launcher.

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 - Making the Magician.

 The Magician was the last main character to be designed. As the story was being developed, he was a rival love interest for the mime, then he was just a bad guy, then he was dropped from the story, and then, eventually, he was brought back at the end to hint at a new antagonist for the next chapter in the "Pepe and Lucas" narrative. My first set of designs were made long before we settled on the clown or the mime design and as such, none of them felt right for the part. However, I did like a lot of the ideas I came up with.

Our starting point for the Magician was that of the three types of entertainment we'd be showcasing, the magicians would be the dominant type of entertainers in the show industry. They would be defined by illusions and control and would come off largely as the upper class of entertainers.  Refinement and luxury with a sense of power and pomposity were pretty easy since magicians typically dress that way - so capes and suits abounded in my designs.

 I don't know how this would have ever fit in the story, but I loved the idea that the magician could grow little shadow rabbits out of his head to act as his henchmen.

 Inspired by the costume Ian McShane wore in the theatrical production of Faust. I really liked the way they stylized a formal suit.

 Evil Napoleon.

 Magic transformation gone wrong New Yorker, Eustace Tilly.

 Day of the Dead style magician.

 Thug magician.

 I don't know.

 Back alley hunchback magician.

Snake charmer. Charmer of snakes.

 If you've read my previous posts, you know that the above sketch became the rival design for the clown, which was transformed into the magician. It was easier to maintain a visual style this way, since each main character was developed at different stages of the story in different styles. If only I could have done that for the mime. By the time the magician was put back into the story, his role was reduced significantly as well as the role of magic. The mime would essentially have limitless imagination power, the clown would have a thousand mechanical gadgets, and the magician would have no real power at all, just the illusion of power. He was still regal, but in a Vegas showman way. Over glitzy and hiding behind smoke and mirrors. My director was developing a background story where magicians had risen to the top of the entertainment business, which controlled the city which our short takes place in, and behaved much like the mob, controlling everything from behind the scenes. As a consequence, other forms of entertainment - miming and clowning, would have been crushed and reduced to street performance. I developed this idea a little more when I designed the traveling circus that Pepe trained at, now broken down and exiled to the outskirts of the city.

The final magician design.

As with all the characters, once we had finished designs, I was tasked to create additional characters for that form of entertainment that we might meet in later episodes/shorts. With such a cartoonier and more abstract style, not much of my first round of magician designs carried through. A lot of the mystique was lost in favor of more sequins and more ego. You can see one female design based off of the mime physique :) and several of the other magicians are based on the main magician's design.