Character Brief:
To help me come up with some ideas for my character, I wanted to come up with a brief to keep all of my ideas fairly similar, yet still unique. My first brief was short and would be expanded upon later, when I came up with my characters backstory.
Brief: A disgusting, terrifying to look at monster that is trapped on board a space ship with you. The monster is blind and uses echolocation to see where its victims are.
This brief, whilst rather short, helped me get some initial ideas down on paper.
Initial Ideas:
With this brief, I started exploring some images that fit the brief to help generate ideas. Some of these images fit the brief perfectly like the top right, and some I just liked the unique body shape and silhouette like the bottom right.
Idea 01:
My first idea from the brief was some kind of skinny infected alien who has a sack on his head. The gross sack would be blocking his vision and the arms of his previous victims would be controlled by the infection. The victims’ arms would click, allowing for the alien to see where his next victims are via echolocation.
Idea 02:
For my second idea, I wanted to keep the arms used for echolocation as I thought that was something to be expanded upon. This time, I imagined a chunkier silhouette as whilst it still fit the brief, it was something different from the first idea.
One potential problem with this idea is that if the character uses echolocation to hear, their chunky loud footsteps would make it hard for them to hunt pray as it would drown out any potential victims footsteps too.
Whilst I realise that this character design doesn’t make sense because of that, I am still glad I created it as it made me realise that from now on the character must be quiet, sneaky and as a result – skinny.
Idea 03:
Whirligig beetles, with approximately 700 species worldwide, are inhabitants of freshwater ponds, lake margins, alongside other water based environments. It is believed that the Whirligig beetles can use echolocation to locate their pray.
Therefore, for my next design I took some inspiration from them.
I tried to make this design more bug-inspired with a shell on the back and a hunched over silhouette. The sensitive antennas on the front would be used to detect the sound waves of its prey.
Overall, whilst it was interesting to research more unique users of echolocation, a Whirligig beetle wasn’t too inspiring ideas wise.
Idea 04:
For my final quick sketched initial idea, I decided to create a more lanky monster. During this sketch I played around with the proportions a bit, making the arms hang extremely low – to see if that would add more horror to the character.
I also tried a couple different poses to get a better feel for the characters personality as drawing just a face or a front facing pose can sometimes limit character design.
Conclusion:
Overall, this was a good start to my character design process. I’m not totally convinced by any of the designs so far but the brief I made has pushed me in the right direction. The next step will be to experiment with some of these concepts further and start adding colour / testing the silhouette.
References:
Voise, J. & Casas, J. (2014) Echolocation in Whirligig Beetles Using Surface Waves: An Unsubstantiated Conjecture. Available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264541762_Echolocation_in_Whirligig_Beetles_Using_Surface_Waves_An_Unsubstantiated_Conjecture [Accessed 12/12/2022].