Character Design Brief...

After receiving our first brief for the Narrative unit on Monday, we received our second brief on Tuesday for the Character Design unit to run along side Narrative. Although i'm not necessarily strong in the area of character design, i'm reallly looking forward to learning a lot of techniques and skills from this unit and develop one of my weaker areas. In this brief we are asked to produce a 'Character Desin and Animation Bible' for a rebooted eighties saturday cartoon. This encompassing source book will contain a synopsis of the show, expression sheets and turnarounds for the three characters we have been asked to deign; The Hero, The Villain and The Sidekick. Typically, these 1980s cartoons comprise of multiple genres or a 'mash up' of ideas. Therefore we will receive a random set of genres by drawing two traditional playing cards and matching them to a list of randomised genres. The two genres i received were Western + Kung Fu Fighter = Western Kung Fu Fighters. Straight away people were connecting this with the films Shanghai Knights and Shanghai Noon starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. This will definitely be a good starting point and a big influence in my ideas. In this 10 week project will will be assigned different tasks to be completed by the next week's class and this will slowly increase our understanding of the topic and build up our 'animation bible'.