Katie Lam Animation Year 2

Sol turned out to be an wonderful looking doll. His differing eyes look much more unique than regular dolls and his mismatched pattern design works well to integrate that dilapidated look to his characteristics.

The reason for this colour choices was because referring back to the Mood-boards many of the dolls had a more de-saturated look to them so we decided de-saturated would lend itself to a more Macabre look in the end. His warm toned palette is to come across as endearing and it certainly comes off that way when at a first glance. It was better in the end that his patterns were more on his body than his ears so it focused more on the body itself where the main flame is rather than making his face busy with his ears having patterns on them instead.

Overall his design works well to show a run down doll with many stitches and has charm because of its asymmetrical lopsided nature. If I were to redo Sol I would have added more of that uncanny and uneasy relations to death to really push that theme into the work itself. An example would be containing an odd liquid inside Sol so when he gets damaged this leaks out rather than stuffing to create that uneasy feeling when something strange comes out of an item that it usually doesn’t come out of.

As a team the decision was unanimous to use the bunny design in future designs. The next step is to revise the design and making it more unique while keeping it animator friendly. In this stage I decided to draw initial turnarounds for characters. This was to start envision the characters in a more 3D plane while also getting to start knowing their personality and their key traits.

Decisions we then made followed:

• Sols ears will be further apart from him and raised to create a more dynamic silhouette while keeping the general pose ability quite loose so its easy to create many expressions from his normal stance.
• His shape change to a more of a teardrop shape rather than an oval body shape.
• His eyes changed to one large and one small, this is to show his weakened state and add a little charm to the character as they are not perfect and symmetrical. Same to the ears.
• we also moved the soul to where the heart would reside so it reads more as a heart soul rather than just a floating light in the character.
• we added more things to his legs to make him feel more unique.
• Overall added more stitching to emphasize the doll aspect of Sol.

Overall this was a successful development in the design since it revamps Sol to a vintage looking doll much more like what the Mood-boards suggest. Sol also looks a lot less new and instead already has a uncanny feeling with one ear bigger than the other he certainly looks more Macabre than before.

Keywords:

Macabre: The uncanny and uneasy feeling towards something that can be related to death.

Hybrid: Made from two different organisms to create a new variety of species from those two.

At the beginning Sol was a main theme of Macabre and Hybridization. He had not become a bunny just yet. I came up with many of my own ideas as to what Sol could be but none of them really stook out. They all were either too organic or too robotic. This meant we had to look for a more in-between design.

To hybridize our main protagonist more, we integrated patterns inspired by dolls in the mood-boards. We used animal dolls as reference from the company called “Jelly-Cat”. The dolls they harbor are childlike and simple so using them as reference we produced these initial sketches.​

This was a great direction to go as it allows us to start piecing the characters past and how we can start the story with these aspects. In the end we landed on my design of sol a the bottom as a starting point to develop his design more. This was mainly because it featured all the aspects we were going for at the time (e.g the soul flame, patterns in the ears and a bunny character with floppy ears). The flame is meant to signify life in a soul hence his name being Sol however the part that makes it Macabre is how Sol loses life later down the line in the story.

A technique that will be used later on is a animation technique used by a show called “Chowder” This show has patterns on the characters for clothes that follows them across the screen when they do. This is an interesting way to present texture and when using as many patterns as we intend it is a good way to keep them all consistent while still looking clean and clear.