Camp Bestival 2013 Design
The lead character is a young alien girl called Gertie. In the early stages of this project we drew some inspiration from Windsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland comics, and while designing the character we named her Gertie after another of McCay's famous works, Gertie the Dinosaur. Gertie needed to be incredibly physical and stretchy as she climbed about her environment, and use all of her body to understand the world around her. I went through a quite lengthy process to finally hit on the right face, body and colour combination, all while clearly showing her inquisitive and gumptious character. She changes colour throughout the animation due to her location and her mood, and also harbours a secret fighting technique where she can divide into 3 'Mini Gerties', seen when she is fighting the Black Hole Monster. The Black Hole Monster was intended to be a manifestation of negative human impact on the planet - he is found in a deforested area of the rainforest and eats everything around him. Gertie stands her ground against him as she has seen the planet has so much beauty that it's worth fighting for! Lastly, I've included some designs for her spacecraft, seen at the beginning and end of the show, piloted by her alien partner. At one stage, Gertie's parents were to be in the spaceship and featured in the animation, forgetting to take her with them when they finished their visit to Earth.
Background Design
Designing backgrounds for large-scale projection on architecture can be different from designing backgrounds for regular animation. Textures, large areas of white or pale colours and low contrast colours tend not to work well, especially when there may be a lot of smoke from the fireworks in the show. Bright, punchy colours work best, and it was handy that we opted to change Gertie's colour scheme depending on her backgrounds so that we could always see her on the castle. Originally I designed backgrounds and elements only for the scenes with Gertie exporing the hedgerow and Gertie fighting in space. However, due to complications near the deadline, I also had to design the backgrounds for the Gertie cycling in France scene. Despite the very limited time I had to get these finished and working in the animation, designing these elements was quite enjoyable as I like to combine bright, warm colours with more sensitive linework in backgrounds featuring architecture and city skylines.