Character Design

For the boy I wanted a relatively realistic looking boy, about 9 years old, maybe slightly older. It should be an age where one is still fairly honest in the expression of one's feelings, but old enough to make thoughtful decisions and take responsibility for them to some regard.

These were the initial sketches I made. Note that I had been immensely out of practice and used these sketches as part as exercise.

The idea with these was to try a variety and see which one I reacted best to. From the group I thought the only successful one for the project was the bottom right one. He has a 'boy next door' feel without evoking a feeling for a specific character type.

From there I went and experimented some with different facial proportions:

From these new options I decided that I still liked the overall face shape and the even quality from the first original example. However the bottom right one had a more youthful feel to it that I was still missing. Therefore I decided to try different facial expressions for both.

I only had to draw one more facial expression for this to realise that, no matter how much I liked the face shape and its proportion, it was too old. Therefore I abandoned this and went on to do a few facial expressions for my other option.

This was what I finally decided on. I found that while he still looked slightly too old, especially with negative facial expressions, There was something for me to work with. The upper left one has a nice push of the cheek that brings out a bit of youthful chubby cheeks, which works quite nicely.

I would later try and work with facial shape, eye line and position to try and make him a bit younger still.

The changes I made to the above versions were the following: I lowered the eye line slightly to make the forehead appear bigger. Babies have bigger heads and tend to grow out of them as they grow into children and later adults. I got rid of the line indicating the bridge of the nose. Children usually don't have a nose bridge defined enough to warrant such a definitive line. I made the neck a bit thinner and gave him a bit more fat around the cheeks. I also later lowered said fat a bit so it sits right by the chin up to the cheek bone. I'm quite happy with the result as it came out. I find he still looks slightly older than the 9 years I mentioned previously, but I've decided to stick with this as it looks very close to what I imagined.

I only did very few pose examples, as I found it more important to concentrate on the storyboard and animatic, to lay down the actual poses to concentrate on. Because I'm not the strongest drawer I tend to take a bit longer to get to an acceptable result and therefore prioritise my time a lot in cases like this.

I started a little line test. The test isn't from a scene that will be in the film because I did it before I had finalised that. It's not actually quite finished yet. It's missing a few frames at the end and I'm not completely happy with the timing just yet.

It also uses the style of line work I've decided to use, without colour however. Please find more on that in the tap Stylistic Approaches / Concept Art.

I only very late started thinking about what his clothes should look like. I definitely wanted them to be pyjamas, something you always wear when you don't want to leave the house, those clothes that you wear straight out of your washing machine because they're your comfy clothes. Therefore I also didn't want to change his outfit too much throughout, maybe a different pattern hear and there, or a replacement from time to time, but the majority of the time he's wearing the same clothes. His comfy clothes, almost trying to console himself and definitely a sign that he's not going anywhere.
So I put a little sketch together of basic sleep wear:

The are so basic because I didn't want them to send out any message - apart from I'm wearing this at home. I've used trousers similar to the ones in the middle and the t-shirt for the storyboard and the animatic so far. I might switch to the trousers on the left, as they seem more like pyjama trousers. However, I might stick to the t-shirt, as I don't know many people that wear long sleeve at home a lot. Again, I might switch it up for a scene or two, but I think generally the clothes shouldn't call attention to themselves.



For the reading light I started with googling and just sketched out a few 'candidates'.

I knew I wanted a simple design and felt attracted to the two headed one towards the middle. I had just put down the first sketch for a little movement test for it when I realised that I found two heads too distracting. I didn't like how much 'between-the-line-conversation' was going on between the two heads rather than between it and the boy. The whole point of the reading lamp is for it to feel abandoned, like the boy is forced to abandon his reading. Therefore I decided to scrap the two headed reading light, but keep the overall design of it. It's a fairly modern idea of a reading light, small, compact, but useful. It's good for a child, since it's not easily broken, indicating that it had been with the boy for a long time.

That's the test I started on:

So this is what I've decided the lamp to actually look like: