Mark Grist character design sketches
We started the project with a series of sketches to flesh out the character of Mark Grist and develop an art style for the animation.
We continued to develop the character and art style by rendering a key scene from the script, where Mark is surrounded by Zombies. The rough sketches from our initial plans were re-drawn in Illustrator using basic shapes with consideration to how these would be animated. At this stage we also tested out some potential colour palettes which led us to the bold black, white & red theme that we finally chose.
The final colour palette was inspired by iconic music video’s like ‘Go With The Flow’ by Queens Of The Stone Age and ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes.
Monster character design
The monster design was harder to crack as the script called for a large fire-breathing creature with ape like characteristics, that also had to be an evolution of the Mark Grist character. We settled on a large Godzilla inspired character with long arms like an ape and an exposed skull to represent it’s human side.
Animation
By using basic shapes to create the character designs we were able to easily create animation rigs using After Effects & rubber hose 2.0. The Zombie scene was once again used as our testing ground to see how everything would come together.
We also created some frame by frame animation to give some scenes in the video that special ‘hand drawn’ touch. A key scene from the video that employed this technique can be seen below with our original hand drawn frames on the left and the final rendered animation on the right.
