Before writing Zero, I work shopped character concepts with Brett Bimson our production designer. We discussed the varying physical attributes of our characters and the look and feel of the environment they inhabit.
Once the story was locked down, we had the fun task of bringing the world to life with illustration. I started off by briefing the multi-talented David Cox who was our sculptor/modeller/painter/animator and illustrator. He got to work and sketched these preliminary concepts:
Next, we defined the difference between what a zero numbered character should look like compared to their higher numbered counterparts, these were the results:
Now that the body shapes were defined, we wanted to get a feel for how the higher numbered characters looked in comparison to each other. As this world was based on a class system, the higher numbers had to look cleaner and more orderly than the lower numbers. We imagined 9′s may be royalty, 8′s as politicians, 7′s would be military and so on till we got to 1′s who were lowly street sweepers.
It was decided that the wool wrapping on the higher numbers would be very neat, but would degrade as you went down the ladder. 1′s were wrapped just a poorly as zero’s but had the benefit of being fully formed.
The next task at hand was designing a body shape for the ‘she-zero’ and higher numbered female characters. Early sketches of females weren’t really fitting the bill. An example of this can be seen in the character sketches above of the number 4 sitting at the bar. The breasts just looked… weird. I decided to sketch some body shapes and we settled on the following:
The result was a skirt-shaped base similar to that of ‘Lisa Simpson’. Giving them female hair styles further assisted in distinguishing them as feminine characters.
With the character body shapes now established, we were ready to move on to the next step of production… sculpting the characters out of clay.
Previous posts from 'Behind the Scenes':
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June 18th, 2009 at 6:37 am
great stuff guys!
jriggity
June 18th, 2009 at 6:42 am
Thanks… and nice going on being first to comment on our site :)
June 21st, 2009 at 9:54 am
Awesome work. You say that the female character had a slight skirt-based form of Lisa Simpson. One day someone will say they had their character form based on that of ‘Zero’. Looking forward to watching the film whenever that may be!
June 21st, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Hey Tony, thanks for the kind words!
June 24th, 2009 at 2:34 am
Trailer and illustrations are really great! Hope to see the short in Italy too and not only in the festivals circuit. I guess that it would be perfect for young students too.
Valentina
June 24th, 2009 at 11:27 am
The concept behind the characters’ design is great! Looking forward to see the film!
July 14th, 2009 at 5:58 am
Hi, I have stumbled across your site while looking for information about stop-motion films because I am thinking of starting work on my own first attempt at stop-motion.
I think your ideas and the trailer look very very good, and I am simultaneously daunted and inspired by your work! I look forward to being able to watch your film somehow, somewhere, and I will be bookmarking this site so I can keep up to date with the fascinating behind the scenes news.
Thanks!