Once Upon a Time there was a Circus of Death

The final part of the assignment was to create two game trailers in the form of storyboards from the characters we had made. I split my characters evenly (two for each idea) and started planning out some ideas for each. It didn't take long for two ideas to emerge - My first idea was a game based on children's nightmares and bed time stories. This eventually became the idea for 'Once Upon a Time' in which Lily and Jimmy (two of my characters) were trapped in a bed time story themed nightmare.

My second idea was a creepy carnival with scary monsters in it. This eventually became the idea for 'Ninette & Simone et le Cirque des Mort' (which translates as circus of death, i used French purely because things always sound cooler or creepier in French :P).  Here are some planning sketches for my second idea:

This idea for a monster was scrapped

                                     

A Yeltie :O?

 As time went on i started to neglect my first idea a little bit. I was really into my second idea as it gave me an opportunity to go wild with character design- something this course rarely lets you do. My first idea suffered due to this and you can see it didn't get as much love. I present to you 'Once Upon a Time' :

This game trailer starts like a fairytale with the words once 'upon a time' and then after every line a still from the game is shown until some music kicks in and the shots get faster. The game would mainly be about you and your brother/ sister (depending on which character you played as) trying to escape your nightmares and reach the end of the book. This story didn't get enough attention and turned out to be pretty cliche and followed the same sort of story as 'The Pagemaster' film (although i didn't realise that at the time). If i were to redo this assignment, this story would most likely be scrapped and redone with the same characters.

Like i said, i enjoyed my second idea much more- the characters were much stronger, the story was better and i could actually picture a game coming from it. It's no surprise that because of this my second storyboard was much more colourful and interesting. Here is my second game trailer, with some close ups of the most interesting shots, I present: 'Ninette & Simone et le Cirque des Mort'.

The game trailer would give a brief outline of the current circumstances by a voice over. The voice explains how the circus used to be a big family but then death visited the circus and cursed it, which turned almost all the performers into hideous mutated killing machines. Only two people remain sane- the circus master Ninette and a juggler named Simone.

The trailer features some of the enemies you face including a confused mutated animal trainer, a skeletal lobster man, a deranged trapeze artist and a soulless pair of contortionist, psychic twins. The aim of the game would be to survive and try to free your friends from the deadly curse. I liked this idea much more and if i were to redo this assignment i doubt anything other than a few minor tweaks would be changed.

Person to Character

The second stage in the summer assignment was to use the sketches of strangers and turn them into actual characters. This took me a long time as i was unhappy with a lot of the potential characters i was creating. In the end i decided to just doodle as that is usually where my best ideas come from (especially when I'm on the phone to people, you should try it). This helped me a lot and soon i got four characters that i was pretty happy with: Jimmy, Lily, Simone and Ninette! Here are the character study sheets i did in photoshop:

I really like these characters, however i don't think Simone or Ninette's character sheets really do them justice, i found it much more difficult to capture pictures of them showing emotion since in my head their role in the game would be to simply hack n' slash the enemies down. They come across much better in my storyboards in my opinion. My favourite character though is Lily. Her character sheet includes the biggest variety of emotions and movements.

Stalking People

Over the summer we were given an assignment - go out and draw passersby, adapt these quick sketches into actual characters and then create two game trailers with them. This post will focus on the first part of the assignment where i had to go out and draw strangers on the street. I considered myself to be quite stealth like as i glanced at people quickly and then scribbled down a sketch of them, but in reality i was apparently staring at them whilst they walked past like an absolute stalker. No-one said anything though luckily, that would have been pretty embarrassing... Well anyway, here are my stalker doodles, the ones with stars next to them are the ones i chose to experiment with and use for my game trailers.

After sketching all these people i scurried away back to my house and felt a little sorry for these people. Little did they know i was about to emphasise all their features and use them as part of my summer project. The feeling soon passed.

Don't send out the search and rescue just yet...

Hey, I'm back. I was off having a life in summer and neglected this blog a little too much. I didn't particularly do much art over summer so there aren't any bits of work to upload from then, however I did do some work for university but I'll upload that separately. So yeah, that's about it.

Here's a picture of a guinea pig playing Xbox for you while I upload actual work.