These are a few designs that I did recently of the main character in BYU's next animated short film, currently titled Pwned. This lovable oaf is named Jeff. He's a hardcore gamer who ends up facing off against a surprisingly formidable opponent.Despite my focus being camera and layout, character design is something of a hobby of mine and I thought it might be fun to play around and do a few designs for the film. I'm pretty good with goofy, and Jeff is definitely goofy.
The design to the left is the first iteration I did of Jeff. His character was originally pitched as the typical gamer -- grossly overweight, no life outside of video games, etc. I decided to play around a bit with the character, envisioning him as perhaps an older guy who's a cop or ex-military (hence the tinted aviator sunglasses).
The director, while he was kind enough to oblige the design, preferred for Jeff to be college-aged and overweight with wannabe hipster glasses instead of the aviators. So, below are the roughs and more finalized suggested facial expressions for Jeff.
I'm serving as the director of photography for camera on Pwned, so one of the things that the director and I get to do is figure out the visual language of the film. I thought it might be fun to have Jeff's side of things be a little Scott Pilgrim-esque, so I decided to put this together to show the director:
I'm not quite sure why, but the GIF is playing a bit slower than I'd like. I've uploaded the video to Vimeo and put music to it if you feel like seeing it at the proper speed:
The story for the film is a lot of fun and I'm excited to work on it. The schedule is pretty tight, with the goal of finishing before the end of the year, but it should definitely be a fun ride.