Bronk & Bongo

So I after making my last few tweaks I am proud to say I have finally finished doing the turnarounds for all the characters appearing in the short and I have to say thanks to ERIK CHICHESTER for his help in fleshing out my designs and being the voice of reason and getting me to stop when the characters were done. Thanks bud! If not for Erik I would still be maniacally re-drawing my first pass. One of the characters, ANGRY ERIK (see below) was designed in his honor. Anyway, as you all may know, turnarounds are what helps the animators and board artists know what your character looks like from all angles.

Sometimes character designs work only from one angle, and sometimes a character that looks great from one angle looks horrible from another, and worse still, sometimes things in the front don’t really line up with things in the back, then you have to cheat.

So this has been probably the most time consuming aspect of all for me. Also there are so many darn characters in our short and I wanted to make sure that none of their designs looked generic or random. I wanted even the smallest background character to feel like he was meant to be there. Like he was a real, considerately fleshed out character.

Other problems that arose while I was doing this was I would occasionally slip into another style and when all was said and done I had to go back and redesign certain characters who didn’t fit in with the look of the whole cast. Then as I mentioned in a previous post I had to make some further changes after the actors performances added more character information.

So I ended up scrapping a lot of the earlier designs but someday you’ll be able to see those sketches and more on the BRONK and BONGO season 1 DVD extras.

Bloggingly yours, Alan and Manny.

Bronk and Bongo, now fortified with more posts!