Poster child...or just posters

So while touching up the last few of my backgrounds, meaning a few more shots are completely finished ready for After Effects (my old nemesis!), I created some posters for Audrey's bedroom.

These are incredibly important as they are the primary focus in the establishing shot. I created a set which can be easily transferred for consistency across different shots, which is a huge time-saver as these are rather detailed compared to the basic colouring of the backgrounds.

The whole film is a homage to the horror genre, especially the classic monster movies, which are a favorite of mine, so I had a whale of a time creating these parodies of classics, both in title and the monsters themselves.

The signatures aren't included in the final film obviously!

The hand-written text irks me, and I wish I had time to go back and neaten it; but I can take comfort in the fact that most of the time it will be too small to see and the main focus is on the images.

I don't know about you, but I would totally watch "Kids of the Yeast,"if it was the "children of the corn"/"village of the damned" crossover I made it appear to be.

There Be Monsters in colour!

So cleanup and colouring has begun on my final film at long last, with some shots finalized, so I thought it fit to show you a coloured version of a pre-existing shot

So here's Big Bad, snapping and snarling

There be Monsters concept art-The Big Bad

This one is slightly smaller than Audrey's and Gizzards (which I have to apologize for as this fella has a rather major role) but many of his action poses could lead to potential spoilers (as they had him interacting with other characters). So apologies for this, they will be up on this post after the film is up.

But for now let's have a talk about The Big Bad

This lumbering beast (who in reality is nameless) was probably the last monster I designed, solely because his role was so important and he had to leave the biggest impact out of all of the five monsters. As a result, he needed to have the most dynamic construction, colour scheme and overall presence.

Okay, I'll admit, these poses were kind of a joke!

His appearance was originally much more wolf like and mangy, which sadly made him come across as more pathetic than threatening; so his final design is instead based on three creatures in particular; a rat, a bear and a vulture. Considering his primary purpose was to appear frightening, his body consisted of the features of each animals which people often find the most intimidating/squeamish. So for the rat he has the long tail and fingers, for the vulture he has the sharp beak and eyes, and for the bear, it was the general bulk, and even the voice to an extent. This also gave him a wider variety of movements and expressions (for example, the three tufts on the back of his head act like how ears would for many other animals, pinning back when he's angry and fluffing up when he's pleased).

I wanted his colour scheme to stand out compared to the other characters, as while Audrey had a distinct colour scheme that should have made things easy, most of the monsters were already bright, eye-catching colours (blue, purple, green and...then there's Doug who is the color of snot, but that was the point). After experimenting with pretty much every colour on the spectrum, I finalized a pinkish red, as it still connotes how dangerous he is while not being blinding.

This may also be a good time to talk about the voice. While the human characters are voiced by other people, I had a hard time finding people willing to attempt any of the monster voices. So, being an aspiring voice actress when I'm not animating, I had a go myself...at all 5!
Luckily with the magic of pitch shifting, The Big Bad was able to sound animalistic and it's now unrecognizable, while the other 4 came out with enough variety for me to give them a pass without editing.  But we'll see how they sound all together in the final product, then we can all have a good laugh at my expense.

Now next week, we can see more of this guy as we look at my first colour preview from the film.