November Update: The black cat makes his return!

Dear Patrons,

I always feel like this time of the year flies by so fast. To think, next month's blog update will be the year's last. Recapping this past month is difficult, because it has mostly just been a matter of keeping my head overwater, juggling the responsibilities of these two very different production, and trying to squeeze a bit of mental recovery time (still aching a bit from triple-work-September) in there. It's for this reason that I haven't opened the online store again as I'd talked about in my previous update. I finally got the last deliveries I was waiting for, but I just don't see myself having the extra energy to administer that right now. Hopefully after the animatic work wraps up in December! If you'd really really been hoping a Zale figurine for Christmas, don't be afraid to drop me a line though - I can manage a few individual cases if needed, just not a whole store.

TV-SERIES:

The pilot animatic is moving forward really well! The difficult part of it isn't managing it on it's own, but to juggle it together with the rest. After all, this is really important to me, and I don't want it to come off as half-hearted. So I want to have given the most I can give. The storyboard artist is doing such an amazing job, and I think it's honestly the best Tales of Zale has every been (with the caveat that it's of course a pilot episode, so we can't delve tooo far deep into the story at once of course, just skim the surface). I really really hope that I will one day get the chance to share this with you all. 

We've also just about finalized the demo for the intro song! It's been super awesome to be able to work with Matthew at this scope, and I'm really happy with how the soundscape has gotten to evolve.

This Monday we're having a meeting with the same casting Director that we worked with for the trailer to see how far we can get on the budget we have. We won't be looking for final voice castings at this point, since it's still too early, but we will be trying to get some strong representative voices on board. I'm really excited!

FINALLY, IT'S MORPHEUS' TURN:

I say finally, because among the main cast, he's been the last on the list to get the design treatment on multiple occasions now. But we finally got to him, so say 'hi' to this new Morpheus!

Now let's have a look at how we got here:

You of course know Morpheus from the very first episode of the web-series, where he serves as a sort of adversary when Zale and Elva enter the ruins:

And then he returned in Flickering Lights with a slightly refined and stylized design, and served a similar role there:

After Flickering Lights, just like with Zale and Elva, I set out to loosen up Morpheus' design. I didn't want to get too stuck on it:

When it became time to give the design the TV-treatment, I started out with a reference board, just like with the others. Morpheus is another one of those characters where I had a hard time finding a perfect personality reference for him. I mean, honestly, that's the case with all of them. You start out from a couple of archetypes, and then work your way into a more stand-alone character from there. Morpheus is definitely over towards the "older mentor who has seen what ugliness the world has to hold and has chosen to emotionally and/or physically distance themselves from it" archetype. With some slight sprinkles of mastermind manipulator in there.

I think those of you who watch a lot of anime know exactly what type of enigmatic smile it is that I'm going for with Morpheus, but of course Sammy didn't have the same frame of reference, so it was something we'd have to work our way into.

She started out with some cool pencil sketches of Morpheus, but they were either a lot more serious or a lot more expressive than what I wanted for Morpheus. It proved to be quite the challenge - there was a line of contained emotion that I just did not want to cross.

Another thing that proved a challenge was the shape language. With the other characters already made, we were going for a strong and distinct shape language. I knew that I wanted to make Morpheus pretty slick and spiky like in his original design - he should be the type of character that if they were a couch, you wouldn't be entirely comfortable sitting on. But getting to that, while having him still work 3-dimensionally, and not looking too generic was more difficult than I'd thought.

With nothing feeling quite right, we went back to the drawing board by just focusing on the silhouette first. At this point another thing that worried me was that he would very easily start overlapping with some of the wolves we also had planned for the series, so I started to push for a thinner Morpheus (brain over brawns):

I took one of the silhouettes that Sammy had made and made some modification and tests on it:

Sammy then used that as a base to do further explorations with:

It was a lot of back-and forth at this stage to find something that felt just right.

We finally found some heads that felt very much like Morpheus. These became the basis for the rest of his design. We also started testing what type of scar would work best in animation.

Of course, even with the heads in order, getting just the right feel into Morpheus' posing was still a balancing act. Here's an example of some of the draw-overs I did:

With this, we started to get close to a posing sheet:

And there we go! A new Morpheus! Now, as I mentioned on Sesam as well, here towards the end of development, we didn't have as much time for tweaking each character. Originally, the aim had only been to arrive at final designs with just Zale and Alba, so getting to work on Sesam, Evelyn and Morpheus was more of a luxury. I do actually like the overall design we ended up with for Morpheus, but I don't necessarily think that most of the drawings hit him quite as spot-on as I'd like.  This is mostly down to the fact that we didn't have that much time left to tweak and polish at this stage. The close-up faces of Morpheus are definitely my favourites among these. But it's a great overall base to work from in the future!

As always, be sure to check out more of Sammy Torres' work here. Let me know what you think of the new Morpheus!

ROUND-UP:

Honestly, it's weekend and I want to make the most of it to work on the animatic! I've still got a whole lot of editing to do and a bit more thumbnailing. So I will try to keep it short - this is the last new design from our development round last year. I'm really curious to hear what you think, both about Morpheus and the redesigns overall. What else I can show is a bit more limited, so there won't be more polls coming up at the moment, but I'll try to still find a nice little selection for you from month to month! And hopefully after December, I'll have a bit more time to start drawing for myself without being under NDA again, so that'll be nice to be able to share too...

Till next time! All the best,

- Sif