Lion creature design

Some people asked for the references and thought process behind some of the creatures int my Playground-trailer. I thought I could make a post explaining it!

One of the main ideas behind the different creatures of the playground was that they each represent a childhood game, in this case I was thinking about "green light red light". In french it's called "1,2,3 soleil" ("1,2,3 Sun" in english), so I thought of a creature that could kill with only an eye contact (like medusa), and his face would change between an aware state (sun) and an asleep state (the moon).

This were some of the first ideas I had for the creature. Then the creature quickly became feline, because as a cat owner it's sometimes creepy how cats and big cats stand still without moving while they hunt you. And also I was inspired by asian representations of lions ( Indonesia, China and Japan).

Here are some more rough concept arts for the creature, but with all the ideas and references mixed together.

I tried different designs for the head, trying my best to make them as scary as I could. The big round eyes stairing right at us was something I really liked and wanted to keep in the final design since the creature gives a deadly stair.

This were one of the first storyboard ideas for the lion creature sequence. On top of the design, I really like to think of the light and general ambience. The idea of a face that acts like a torch light was interesting visually so I gathered some reference on how the light looked.

The two first images is how you would see the light of the creature face before seeing the actual creature. And the last is the face of the lion in the distance looking at you, the creature sees you before you see her.

Here are other references I had for how the light acted on the background and on characters. Here is a first rough layout for the Lion shot.

Here was a final rough layout, the body of the lion is longer and thiner, just like the tube slides. In fact I like the idea that the creature is adapted to it's surrondings just like a real animal is. His long and thin body  mimics the slide and makes it easy for the creature to move inside it.

Here is a rough sketch of the long body of the creature.

And here is a final layout.

I used the line of the layout for the final background.

 Since my graduation film I co-directed with friends (Tamerlan BEKMURZAYEV, Antoine CARRE, Alexandra PETIT, Martin ROBIC) I really like drawing backgrounds in wich the lines are curvy and the perspective is slightly off, it's much more fun to draw and gives the shapes an organic dreamy feel to them. "Ponyo" and "Lu over the wall" both have bendy twisted backgrounds and were a reference for us when doing our graduation film ( go see both of those films if you haven't).

The background was composed of two layers (above and below images). You can see above the ugly parts of the background that should be hidden never to be shown again. Dividing the background in two helped me do a slight paralax effect on the final shot (the two parts move at different speeds to suggest depth)

Here is the final Background.

Here is the image once I added the character, you can see the character is striped like a tiger, his skin mimics the patterns of the tube slide. All of this image was made in photoshop.

And here is the final composited image! ( I added glow on the head, and grain)

And an animated gif of the shot! (you can notice the paralax on the two parts of the background)

This is how this shot came to be, all the other ones have a similar thought process. If you liked this "making of" let me know. I can do more of these formats for the other shots if you are interested!