Here are all the characters that will feature in the real world section of the short I plan to make! The first seven in the top row, who have swatches next to them will be the protagonist, and the daydreamers. Beyond that, anyone facing forward will be a background character on the bus, while those facing to the side will be characters walking along the street while our protagonist walks to work/University.
I wanted to make sure I’d have a big variety of characters to fill the world in order to make the short feel more lived in and realistic, rather than just have the characters whose daydreams the telepath and the audience are looking in on.
To this end, I got some help from some friends of mine with some of the characters! Shay Commander, Evan Connolly, PJ Fairweather and Emily Gordon were all nice enough to send me some of their character designs for me to adapt into my short! All of their websites/portfolios are linked here.
The six characters that are based on their character designs are labelled in the image above, wherever the text is highlighted in white. For these characters, I changed them all into the style of this short, as well as adapted the colour schemes so that they would fit into the colour family I’ve established for the real world, but also so they’d look less like main characters, and blend into the background a little more.
A good example of what I mean be PJ Fairweather’s character, Carrot – the bouncy orange character five along from the left on the bottom row. Originally, as PJ designed them, this character was much more saturated with bright green hair. Very appropriate for a main character, but less so for a the background character I would be using them as. So, for this version of them that’ll appear in the background of the short, I made their colour palette much darker, and removed the majority of the accent colour so they wouldn’t stand out as much.
Now, admittedly, there are a lot of characters here, but don’t worry! Most of these characters will be barely moving, or just a brief loop that can just be a few frames repeated over and over. The most complicated thing I’ll be animating with these characters will be just a basic walk cycle.
Now, all I have to do on the character design front is figure out the characters that’ll appear in the day dreams! These characters will be quite heavily animated – with a bit of variation depending on what style they are supposed to mimic – so will be much simpler overall. I’m working on storyboarding at the moment, but I’ll get onto that soon!