Tag Archives: characterdesign

The creation of “Die wilden Felder und der Krieger” – Part 4

Secondary characters

All figures you can see below are actually not mentioned in the original story. I added them to clarify specific parts of the plot.

The dormouse is living in an old stump on the wild fields. It’s interacting with the warrior as a part of nature in the animated sequences of the movie, where I don’t show the fields.

The warrior is building a scarecrow of his armor. This should show the point when he gets really deep into nature and detach himself from former behaviours.

scarecrow turnaround

I choosed the crows to be a recurring symbol for nature and also used them once for changing the narrative level from the animated sequence to one of the cross-fading parts in which the fields appear.

The butterflies are also used for changing the narrative level and leading us to the flowerfields. Those are surrounded by butterflies to bear out their magical and extraordinary beauty.

The creation of “Die wilden Felder und der Krieger” – Part 3

Doodles

I found some more early sketches of the fields and the warrior when I was looking for the concepts of the secondary characters. It’s interesting how deep you can get into a figure, digging for its character, turning out specific attributes over hours and days … just to realize that it’s not the one.

So you have to start it all over again.

Some facial drafts of a warrior. It was not the one I was searching for…

At this point the warrior had a beard after all (but still not the right one all in all) …

These cloth sketches are obviously influenced by some samurai references…

Sideways shape of the early wild fields.

Some sketches to get the proportions of the characters.

The creation of “Die wilden Felder und der Krieger” – Part 2

The warrior

The fact Moon Suk, the authoress of The wild fields and the warrior, originates from Korea automatically built an asiatic setting in my mind for the whole plot. For that reason I got inspired by some samurai images. I found them at that time while researching for the design of the warrior. Of course I know the samurai’s origin is in Japan, not Korea. But I didn’t want to create a scenery with a specific historical background anyway. So I felt free to explore all kinds of asian tradition and inspiration.

Research and Design

As you can see below, the warrior took a completely different direction in his development comparing to the character design of the fields. The more they developed separately, the better it worked for the story. Because the warrior had to symbolize the real world it was obvious to draw him more concrete than the apparitional fields and give him an outline which defines exactly the warriors shape.

During the process of designing the characters I also thought about totally abstract ways of telling the story. For example, I came up with the idea to let some industrial machines do the acting (the warrior would have been a tank who changes into a combine harvester) and many other stuff, but at the end all this seemed to be a little bit too strange and far-fetched to me.

Finally I am quite happy with the result of the warrior’s character design. At least he is the main character of the film. I wanted him to be a physically strong person, but also a bit instable, maybe naive.

These are a few different phases of the warriors development process.

The warrior has got a really wide chest. He looks a bit like a rooster to me in the side view…

Some final impressions of the warrior.

The creation of “Die wilden Felder und der Krieger” – Part 1

THE FIELDS

Because the fields are interacting with the warrior, I had to come up with characters that represent the respective field. Firstly I thought about the creation of some real women character living on the fields. But soon I felt that the charm the story has to convey would suffer through this concrete execution.

So I went more and more abstract. At last those mystic and spectral but also magical and beautiful beings occur in my mind. Finally I used a collage technique to bring them on paper which would make it difficult to animate the figures frame by frame. Thus I decided to get some motion in it by crossfading the most important keyframes and do the creation of most of the animation later in the compositing.

The wild fields

Development of the main character: the wild fields. At some point it was a consistant decision to show all the fields naked for bringing out their natural being.

Final version of the wild fields.

The flowerfields

The flowerfields had to be glamorous and beautiful. I decided to add some butterflies that should always flutter around her.

Final look of the flowerfield.

The other fields

Vegetablefields

The vegetablefields are my personal favorite. To symbolize fertility of nature I decided they have to be pregnant.

I like the colours of the vegetabelfields and especially the pumpkins and melons.

Potatoefields

The potatoefields were the most difficult. They should look like potatoes somehow but have a sexy appearance anyway.

At last I got the gracious and buxom potatoefields.

Cornfields

The cornfields weren’t easy, too. Because of their pretty angular shape they seemed not very attractive to me. So I was glad about the idea for the crown of corn, which makes them looking a little bit like a showgirl.

Final version of the cornfields.

Some more characters

.Please check out the character design section. I put some new characters stuff there…

Jesus “Dude” Christ

Do you know this guy?

.oder: Neuer Rätselspass aus unserer Rubrik “Wer findet den Fehler?”

Ein guter Illustrator verinnerlicht das Thema seiner Arbeit und versetzt sich mental in die Figuren, die er erschafft.

Ein hervorragender Illustrator ist die Figur.

Vor diesem Hintergrund freut es mich, derzeit wieder an einigen Animationssequenzen und dem Characterdesign für das NDR Bibel- und Deutschlandquiz arbeiten zu können, denn ein alter Bekannter aus der ersten Sendung von 2008 ist auch wieder mit von der Partie.

Neues Kurzfilmprojekt

Steampunk Circus ist ein neues Kurzfilmprojekt, an dem ich zusammen mit den 3D-Artists Duc Minh Tran und Florian Hahn arbeite.

Zur Zeit sind wir noch ganz am Anfang, entwickeln die Story, ein Szenario und die Protagonisten. Für mich persönlich eine sehr interessante und spannende Herausforderung, da es mein erster eigener CGI-Film sein wird. Mal sehen wie ich mich mit meinen Kenntnissen einbringen kann, aber 3D hin oder her: es müssen ja erstmal die Designs gezeichnet werden.

So, here we go…

Steampunk Elofant

Character Design alter Mann

Character Design Mädchen

Nils Eckhardt

You need pictures? I can draw!