So we had this idea for a story (many of the surprises I won't mention here... I'm not big on spoilers but if you've seen my other movies you'll know I like to surprise my audiences) and now we needed to begin fleshing out the look of the world.
One of the things I'm not too interested in is creating photoreal people in CG. I think real life actors are more interesting than creating high-res photoreal people so if you're going to attempt to go for photoreal people (like in the Final Fantasy movies) you're better off just using real actors. I learned this the hard way when I was an animator for the short lived SONY television show, Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles. Some hard core Sci-Fi fans liked the show, but it took a lot of flack from the CG industry and animation community as a write off.
So the first thing my brother and I decided was to make sure this film had a strong presence of art direction and an idea of where it was going. Greg and I are big fans of classic Disney and all things animated. So we started thinking about how a human would have been portrayed if Walt had access to CG back in the 1950's. So we went about the task of designing and creating the hero of our film... Corporal Biggs.
One of the first influences we thought about was of the character of Roger from Disney's 101 Dalmatians (1961). If you look at the upper left of this sketch you will see some resemblance. Then we also looked into what we knew. We liked the look our father had back when he was in college so we tried adapting the character to look like him. He's the one in the top middle. But that looked almost too real. Then Greg began working in a sort of Quentin Blake hybrid style of illustration which spawned the Biggs to the right of frame. That was when we knew we were getting somewhere. He had style and character without being too real or cartoony.
This version of Biggs soon became the production design and was refined slightly to make him look a bit more weathered and disheveled. The final approved design of Corporal Biggs was based off the drawing to the left. This design was also used in all of the storyboards and other conceptual items.
Soon after we both agreed this was the look for Biggs, Greg sculpted him into a CG model and we put it into production.
Until next time troops!
-Christopher
