PROCESS & PRODUCTION BLOG9
Study Task - 1 Weekly Journal




Characters, concept art, expressions and mouth sheet, poses

Researching images related to a warrior, medieval fighter, woman, maiden.

I like these knight statues because of all the detail in the armour and posture. These statues also hold the possibility of the person being a woman because there isn't and excessive armour parts and they seem to be well fitted, thin arms and neck areas, these are points that i'll be focusing on in the design. 

I am researching fantasy female warriors and mages as reference for character design and outfit layout. I'm aiming for chest plate and open arm cuffs, perhaps design based of barbarian with exposed arms and iron fittings around the waist, legs and feet.

This design combines features from medieval warriors and styled with barbarian outlandish theme sections around the arms and legs.   

Warrior:

Armour:

This warrior also possess magic and so she can be classed as a fighter with mage properties, her arms are bare because of this, her ability to use magic (apparent at the end of the animation) allows her to wear armour focusing on her chest and legs with minimal protection on her arms. The idea was so that she could move her arms more with out armour restraining her when casting spells with her hands. 

This design is easy to replicate for an animation, that is why there is minimal detail and open areas of armour on her arms. 

Personality:
The maiden will be designed with more realistic and iconic style, being the role model type and heroic, she will be more serious and concerned personality. Very prideful and honourable as a warrior, aggressive in nature and very little humour and angry most of the time (considerably worse with drink), direct and judgemental, almost ignorant when it comes to pride.

(Images of knights attitude and confrontation)

Design:

Her body is designed to look strong and sturdy and 

These detailed drawings show the dragon character and describe his posture, shape and design. They show his patterns and colour arrangement around his body, perhaps this design is too complicated to animate before the assignment deadline. 

Dragon 

My aim is so that the dragon can be related to by the audience as friendly and not be seen as a generically scary or evil dragon and because of his soft voice and friendly eyes, I feel that I achieved this despite his obvious dominating size, claws and fangs.

I also have realised that having round pupils on the dragon offers more relatable features for the viewer, compared to slit pupils because slit pupils are typically associated with a predator and also slit pupils generally don't convey any positive emotion and are quite a cold look for any character who isn't a villain or evil creature.

'That's a human restaurant' - Boggis sounds like he's clenching his teeth, not because he's grimacing but because his words or speech is affected by his physical body being a dragon with large fangs and maw. (realism)
Cartoony, iconic or realistic?


The dragon will use more cartoony elements in his design because his style is more relatable and friendly to the audience, using rounder features and a large maw to hide his fangs, although this is a subtle feature hopefully it wont be interpreted as monstrous in the final animation, I want to maintain character design based from the character design.

Personality:
Calm, concentrating, curious, friendly, Sociable, Spontaneously aggressive if insulted (like a bull) very defensive and big (displays size with wings and hunched back).