My Animation Coursework Character Design - Brief 1 - by Li Lune

Team Project: "Historical + Horror + Circus" - Undead Clown Alex

For the 1st brief character design, I began with discussing with my team, had our online space for sharing resources & artwork for later. Then I was researching from DJCAD library books by familiarise myself with the Historical Horror genre & Circus theme of the character. 

1st, I was researching, studying and sketching.

Here are some of the books from DJCAD library, and some of board games I borrowed:

The character design I got was an undead Clown whose always look happy but broken inside.

I was discussing and testing with the team for the character costume, the fashion design settled at 1895-1920 period. I looked at 2ndary reference from various films & games, to get to make an interesting design. As a primary research I photted myself for studying the expressions and also get references to understand the human anatomy for drawing the character. 

Research 1:

Research 2:

For brief 1, my undead clown character's called Alex. The key designing features for this final character are: bald on the top of his head, feline kind of big open mouth with a bit smiley expression, no eyelid, standard red round clown nose, different sleeves on his arms impact his split personality. Then the colours of the character should have a contract. Because of the original design is looking scary, I gave him the match of colour red & greenish, just to lower down the scariness. The reason is to let audience relate a bit of the Christmas feeling, and Christmas always has a combination of green & red. But then, I changed the colour green to the colour blue after our style's changed. I had a few group discuss about the final style, it's a skinny cartoon figure. Because the new style is much less scary. So I started to adapt Alex to the new genre with brighter blue & darker red. 

Here is one of the most important sheet for my character design - construction sheet, so other animators can still be able to draw Alex as accurate as they can for the animations:

I got one of the feedback for Alex is to change his hair style simpler - so it'll be easier for animators to animate him! (But for the final submission I haven't got the time to redo the colour part yet, so here we go, it's still the original messy hair style:)