Shane Prigmore & Shannon Tindle design lecture.

At Calarts for the last two fridays, we had Character Designers, Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle, come give a lecture on design and give us an assignment for the following week. Shane and Shannon had worked on the recently released stop motion animation, "Coraline", and talked about the process they went through to creating some of the characters in the film.



the assignment they gave us was to design the characters "Oliver, Dodger, and Fagin" from Dicken's classic novel "Oliver Twist"







On the second friday they came back to look at all the work from everyone who participated and then gave a personal and in depth critique to every individuals work.

My Process
in my thought process of creating these characters i used the description of them from the book to inspire and help me sketch out the feeling i wanted each one to have. For Fagin i really wanted to capture the look of a lizard or reptile given in the book's description. i also thought what if he was stroke victim so the left side of his face would droop down and he would drag his left leg. For Dodger i saw him as hideously ugly kid, one not even his own parents would love, hence being orphaned. Also i choose to use the books description of the hat barley resting on his head, to not even touching his head. Oliver i felt was always and victimized by-stander and i wanted to convey this with big doe eyes and a tiny little mouth to achieve an expression i thought fit my feeling. After the first impression i researched the clothing from early 19th century London. and then i went about drawing the characters into an overall look. i inked the sketched on watercolor paper and then used those sketches and my light table to water color the characters on a separate piece of paper. i then later joined the two in photoshop for the end result.

...as for their critique of my work they really loved my Dodger and the choice make him ugly as possible. They told me that my Fagin was too creature like and not enough human, which they went on to say may have just been the color choice, or to what i think is a portion of personal preference. Shane really liked the the feeling and face of my Oliver but said that the look of his clothing was too "Luke Skywalker" and encourage me to due more research on what he might actually where in that time period. i was totally satisfied with their the time and suggestions they gave us, and just grateful for the experience.