Thoughts and Character Sheets - Freckle and Viktor
Added 2020-06-13 11:15:12 +0000 UTCIf you've been keeping up with the dev log, you might've seen the Viktor sheet already. Freckle's had to be even more detailed for some scenario specific things.
One of the big challenges for me in working with a team of artists is transcribing explanations and breakdowns for character information heretofore stored solely in my cranium. Of course, I have reams of (messy) notes about the characters from years of developing them, but there's a certain broad class of of minutiae one never thinks to write down because, as an author/artist, you just come to know it. Now, suddenly storyboard artists, animators and voice actors need that information too, cataloged and organized, so that they can operate on the same wavelength, and so that the characters remain true to form.
How Freckle's stripes fit around his features and how they react when his face changes shape dramatically into a big grin. Exactly how he holds a sub-machine gun with his short little sausage arms. What are the unique ways he wears certain expressions, what personality traits and emotions inform those expressions, and what array of mouth shapes does he make when he speaks. How Viktor's eye patch interacts with his eyebrow. What poses can he be animated in, and what is he restricted from doing as a result of his bad knees. The standoffish, closed off way he holds his arms. The specific ways Freckle shyly keeps his hands close to his body, opposite Rocky's sweeping, theatrical gestures. And so on...
Character sheets are a big part of this, of course, but there's a great deal of conversation, acting direction, red-line drawing, notation exchanges, navigating tech and budget limitations, and documentation that necessarily takes place behind the scenes too. It's been illuminating, difficult, exhausting, and rewarding.
I deeply hope everyone's hard work and attention to detail will shine in the final product.
(Character sheets by L. Frostad with notes and revisions by Fable and me)
Comments
I am a little surprised there weren't more examples of Freckles' many faces of anxiety. I know even if some details or touchstones are lost in translation it won't be due to a lack of hard work on your part or the dev team's. Your comic is so beautifully detailed that trying to (pardon the pun) distill it into a simpler form it will never be perfectly satisfactory, and that's ok because perfection takes a great deal of time and money and can often be a moving goalpost in any case. Many an artist has praised the virtue of quantity over quality, not because the latter isn't important, but because the only way forward is by doing, something never more apparent than in the timestaking world of animation. Looking forward to more.
Benjamin Coyle
2020-06-15 13:37:00 +0000 UTCWhen I read character sheets, I thought you were making a TTRPG. OMG, A TTRPG WOULD BE AWESOME! I could basically be Call of Cthulhu, with cats. And no Cthulhus. Honestly, except for the cats, that pretty much describes a Call of Cthulhu campaign I was in back in the late 80s, which hardly had any encounters with the supernatural and instead was mainly about speakeasies, rival gangs, hiring temperamental musicians, one guy falling in love with a French vampire--oh wait, yeah, there WAS a vampire as a recurring love interest character. Still, y'know...
David Azzageddi
2020-06-15 03:01:02 +0000 UTC
