July Update: ELVA's new Design!

Well, you SOMEHOW went and did it again. This month's poll ended in another tie -- but as mentioned in the last post, I can't keep giving you double content because of that, so I went and flipped a coin. Elva ended up coming out on top, so she'll be the focus of this month's post. But just like last time, it's going to be a lot of development pictures, so before we get too far into it, let's go ahead and get the blog update out of the way for both this month and the last!

TV SERIES & WORK:

What you are shown these days, is a lot of the TV-series development that we worked on during last year - that which we (myself and the studio) have the rights to show. In the present, things are also moving well along, however. We've been having some very interesting meetings with broadcaster, composer, label manager, and potential co-production partners. And of course, we finally finished our interviews with potential pilot writers, and have found our final candidate. Now things are pretty on track to get started come August. I'm very excited, and also a bit nervous. I really want this pilot to come together well.

There's not much I can do on my end until the writer starts - except for one thing. I have a vague idea of the song I'd like to have for the intro. In fact, I wrote it a very long time ago and have slowly been gaining confidence in it. So I made a rough recording and started planning out a storyboard for it.

Behold, my blurred-out thumbnails! This is the sort of thing that gets underprioritized if it isn't specifically planned for, so I figure I might as well start laying the ground-work. 

Outside of this intro, the plan is to have a different storyboard artist on the full episode animatic. I've worked with these characters for a long time, so it's important that the storyboard artist we get on board has enough experience that they can raise the level of visual storytelling from what I myself can bring. Our first choice is unfortunately unavailable during this period, but I'm pretty confident that we can find somebody with the right cinematographic background. We've still got some time to figure that part out, fortunately. 

The studio has asked me to extend my animation supervising role into an upcoming TV-series they have coming in. We've still got a bunch of stuff left to do on the short film's clean-up, color and compositing supervision, but it is certainly dialling down from it's hectic production heights (managed to make the rough animation deadline just in time!). I was a bit split on taking this TV-series role at first, since it overlaps with the pilot production. But it would be valuable experience that I could bring onward to Tales of Zale (even if this one is a VERY different style), and it's scheduling is such that the production would wrap up right when ToZ could start at it's earliest. Stability, experience, and while being within the same studio which will understand when time needs to be allocated to TOZ? Hard to say no to.

But it does mean that I'm gonna have to juggle a bit in the coming time. Lucky I've got more hands to help me out.

FESTIVALS:

As I've mentioned previously, we're just about winding down on the festival run for Flickering Lights. I haven't found any new festivals that I thought would be a good fit, but there are still a few loose threads here and there. One of those were Viborg Animation Festival, which I was really holding my hopes out for, since it's in the very same town that I live and work in. Glad to say that the film has been selected for the categories 'Open Workshop Danish Talent' and 'ANIMOK'. I'm looking forward to seeing it on the big screen come September, right at home!

OOPS I HURT MY SHOULDER:

Yeah, so I went and got an injury. I swear, it's not a work injury. I just had a bad flu last month, which developed into a stiff neck, which became a hurting back, which became a hurting shoulder. It didn't really disrupt my day-to-day work until it got to the shoulder. And I made it all worse by pressing my luck, lifting some heavy stuff and going swimming. That meant that last week was really bad, and I had to go to the doctor to get some strong painkillers and get forwarded to a physiotherapist. Haven't gone to the latter yet, but fortunately I've seen gradual improvements day by day. I've tried to keep work in front of the computer to a minimum though, just to be safe. While I've kept doing the 9-5, drawing in my spare time has been a bit slower. I might have accidentally pressed my shoulder again today by lifting more heavy stuff, but so far it's not hurting. I'll have to try and be careful though, just while the body is still healing. Fingers crossed!

MORE MERCHANDISE?:

When September and the animation festival rolls around, I'll be attending the Artist Alley that gets held on that occasion. That means that I'll have to prepare some more merchandise. Currently, I've run out of both wooden figures and art books. Art books isn't something that I'll have the opportunity to print again any time soon due to the cost, but I could make more wooden figures (past or new design), key chains, stickers, prints, or something entirely else. There are a couple of our concept art pieces that I'd really like to see made into prints, so I might check with the artists to see if we can set up a nice revenue split. Maybe we could make stickers or key chains out of some of the character art too, we'll see. 

I'm bringing this up, because since I'll have some new stock, I might as well open up the online store for a time again. So if there's anything you'd really like to see in the store, let me know, and maybe I'll be able to prep it!

JOSH'S AMAZING FAN ANIMATION:

So did you see Josh's amazing fan animation yet? I didn't get to bring it up last month, since I more-or-less skipped the blog update, but even if you did already see it, it's worth checking out again!!

OK, LET'S GET TO IT - ELVA'S NEW DESIGN:

A lot of the steps on Elva's design process have been the same as with Zale. So in an attempt to cut down on the amount of text, I'll try to keep any repetions short. If you want the full insights, check out the post on Zale first, and then come back!

So here she is: the new Elva -- or Alba, as she's called in the TV-series. Let me start out by explaining the name change. There's another prominent character in the series who also has a name with E, L, and V in it. Though the overall names are very different, it nonetheless caused a lot of confusion for people in the early script stages. I had a harder time coming up with a different name for the other character, while Elva kind of had an alternative dangling right in front of her. Because the web-series' Zale voice actor tends to pronounce their V's very B-like, I'd found that a lot of people think that Elva's name is Alba anyways. And with Elva being a barn owl, which is Tytus Alba in Latin, it'd be a very suitable name for her too. So this particular name change was a very easy choice for me to make. But I'll still be referring to her as "Elva" on the internet for now. "Alba" is still in development, after all.

Once again, there was a bit of a transitional stage back in 2020, which I haven't shown before. Here I'd set up some general reference sheet:

Then we had Megan Babchuck, who was interning with us at the time do some explorative sketches. 

I'd do notes on these sketches, go back and forth, and then finally pick my favourites and finalize them, giving us this WIP design:

You can see how some of the ideas that were explored at this stage made it into the final design.

You saw my "big plan" for the character designs in Zale's post, but going from this stage, these are the specific aspects that I wanted to explore with Elva:

Now, from here on out, everything you see below is drawn by Sammy Torres (except for red-lines, that's some of my notes and draw-overs). I haven't saved as much process material on Elva as I did with Zale, but if we're lucky Sammy might post some on her SoMe too, like she did with Zale.

Again, we started out with pen and paper. We had taken Zale's design pretty far at this point, but in order to be certain with a few of the stylistic details, we needed to bring in Elva. Zale would become the base for any following quadruped designs, where-as Elva would represent the birds.

I would pick out my favourite aspects of these early explorative sketches to pursue those directions further.

Elva immediately proved troublesome. There are many references to be found for a four-legged creature like Zale, even with this type of shape stylization. But we fall a bit more short when it comes to birds. Elva sits in a realm that we'd just have to brute-force our way into through explorations. The wings and hips were especially an are of focus, because for me there was a very fine line we had to walk between stylization, and something that still felt organic and like it could carry it's own weight.

The wings were one aspect that I knew I wanted to keep from the web-series design. It's an approach to the wings that I picked up working on Merlyn on Wolfwalkers, and which I made my own as time passed. 

An area that was more up for debate, however, was Elva's cheek fluff. I know some folks are going to miss it, but I had a few reasons to change it. One, is that it is something that I've found that every artist draws differently, and can be very difficult to nail down consistently. It's also an area that very easily shifts volume in animation. Sure, it can be mediated with enough direction, draw-overs, and reference, but in the midst of busy production that time may be better spent on quality control - if the design happens to be able to survive without it. Then there's the fact that I've tended to draw Elva with a bit of cheek fat during construction when animating her, and I was always sad to lose that detail once the cheek fluff came on. And then also, the cheek fluff looks good from the front, but it doesn't work quite as well in a quarter view. And in the TV-series, quarter-angles are likely to be more common than full front views, as I'd like to push character interactions over full close-ups and alike. I could rant on about how I think it fits her character and unique silhouette better as well, but hopefully that gives a little bit of insight into some of the considerations at least.

Then, we'd start getting closer to some poses that would inform the final design.

We'd start to work out little details. I especially favoured poses that'd highlight Elva's bird-features. I quite like the side view in the drawing above, by the way. We should have gotten that into the final model sheet as well.

Just a bunch of back-and forth. Of course, just like with Zale, I wanted to push Elva's expressiveness. I was looking at a lot of 80's anime to find the right fear expressions in this case.

And with that, we had Elva's final design:

Now, there are a few small details that I might want to streamline for the final production design. That's going to be the case for the future designs I show too. But we had 1½ month to get through 5 characters and nail down the general style, and for that I think we ended up with a very charming Elva/Alba!

What do you think? Let me know!

ROUND-UP:

And that's that for now! It's a pretty exciting time - although this month will probably be a tad boring as everybody's on vacation. I won't be taking a full vacation myself this time around. I feel like I already got what I needed from my trips to the US, Norway, and Germany over the past year. I'm pretty content just chilling and working over this summer - although I'll be a bit extra careful to not push my body too far. Luckily I've been hired to walk and take care of not one, not two, but three whole dogs over this coming month. Which means that at least I'll be getting lots of walks and exercise no matter how much I might be drawn towards sneaking in some more intro storyboarding time after work hours. So worry not, and enjoy your summer! I look forward to seeing what you pick for me to show next month :D

Till next time,

- Sif