Secondary characters

I had been toying with the idea of adding a second mask character and basing the film around them, but over summer as well as falling in love with masks, I fell in love with Kitsunes from Japanese myth. I had created my own characters and storylines separate from this story, and I will admit I decided to add these into the story purely because I liked them so much!

I started out first with these fox characters based on kitsune, they were merely doodles playing around with my own themes on the subject.

























I really liked the shape of the fox and simplicity of the fox so I stayed with the style.
I began to think of them as a group of foxes that lived in a little community. I mused on the ideas that they'd be able to play instruments, and would wear hats and shoes etc. I wanted them to have quite a Japanese feel since that was where I was drawing my ideas from.










Yet more character sketches. The large ball that all my foxes have is something called hoshi no tama, which in Japanese myth are described as a large pearl and they are thought to store a portion of their power in it. I did try to keep close to how Kitsune were described. I was musing on ideas that they would play with this ball when bored, like balancing it on their nose. They also are able to produce fire, which is simply called fox fire. In one of the pictures below I was trying out a more stylized fire to fit in with my style of art.

yet more characters

I continued to play around with the mask idea, and it was around this time that I decided that I wanted to use them for my third year film, so I started trying to come up with a suitable story to use them in.
I'd always seen the masks as being spirit/god like or a guardian of some sort. I'd been playing around with the idea of them being able to create things or have some form of powers, like in the two pictures below, the first, the mask is creating and manipulating fire, and something like a fire bird is rising up from it. The second is the idea of them having orbs that contain some sort of power. (This idea came from the ideas I was looking at for the secondary character, that being Kitsunes.)

















































The masked character is not complete yet, I think I may yet tweak bits and pieces here and there with it's design, but the two images below are the more complete forms for where I'm heading with it. I like the idea of it being some form of masked dragon. I'm also really fond of all the detail and I'm having a hard time wanting to simplify him down. I'm accepting that it'll be a lot of work but I feel that I'm happy to take it on since I feel it'll be very worth it.

now onto the good stuff

My story is still much in the development stages. I went a different way around things and had a character I'd designed first and as I went on formed a story around him.

The first design in question was this:



















I'd had this urge to draw a creature all day with a human features, but by the time I'd sat down to do such a thing I ended up with this, rather then looking like human features it looked more like a mask, and so my fascination with masked creatures began..

I had begun to fiddle around with the concept of creatures wearing masks and this led me onto putting more detail into the masks, I liked the idea of them being quite unsettling looking by having big grins and almost tribal like patterns:




















I went on to play around with the idea of the fact that the animal could remove the mask and became a person, I purposely kept the fur/hair of the person the same to try to get across that they were one, and that the mask was almost apart of them.
































It was also while drawing these characters that I fell in love with this sort of swirly design, and having flame like wings on each of the limbs.

the film

might as well get this rolling.

This year I really want to explore moving backgrounds, perspective and interaction between characters. I also want to play with the idea of having a large difference in size between my characters.
My influences for this film have been my own characters, Japanese myth, Okami, and some influences from films such as Studio Ghibli and Kakurenbo hide and seek.

film thread awaaay

I'm in my third year studying 2d animation at university.

Last year I produced a short film which was selected to be in our universities film day, you can view it here:

http://vimeo.com/1055829

this blog has been set up to record my design process for my third year film. More will be added as time progresses.