The character

This is my initial character design sheet for the Christmas card. The first design I decided to throw away because I didn't think I wanted my character to be too young as young people would know what holiday it was. So I thought I wanted to make him an older, independent character who would have so much going on that he might not necessarily realise what point in the year it was. I t also allows me to incorporate the idea that consumers have Christmas forced upon them the second Halloween is over. Which I believe is one of the reasons  dislike Christmas. I amn't allowed to become excited about it in my own time. It is forced on me by advertising, Christmas specials in November, The German market in the centre of Edinburgh. It's inescapable! Erm sorry. Anyway that's why not him. At one point I was getting sick of trying to come up with a mature and independent character that appeared to be mildly dressed in a Halloween costume, so I decided to really go for it and Twinkie man was born. That was a sad day for me. The day my character looked the best dressed like a Twinkie. Next I thought maybe I should play around with a normal male, short back and sides appearance but with a twist on a Christmas jumper so I didn't have to work to hard on his shape. It just didn't feel right. So I thought maybe I should make him not give a shit but no that sent the wrong messade. Then finally I got it. He could be naturally orientated towards Halloween then he would appear just the right amount of Halloween although easily translatable to Christmas. Bingo!

So in developing my Christmas card. I decided I wanted some way to unify the entire cartoon from holiday to holiday but retain the shock of his realisation that in fact it is Christmas and not Halloween. I thought about doing the entire thing in just shades of blue, hence the blue shading above.

But it was pointed out to me that the shock of him walking into Christmas might be lost and I definitely don't want that. So then I thought two colours. Red and blue! It's so obvious now!
So here's where I went from there!

And basically I love it!

So in development I obviously considered the obvious:

The nightmare before Christmas! Image courtesy of Capcom Production.

 

So like I said this is the obvious choice to look at when creating an animation about a crossover Christmas/Halloween thing. Naturally I can't make it as complex or long or detailed but it did help me to get thinking about the classic icons of the two holiday which helped me a lot!

 

 

I knew that my animation wasn't an obviously Christmas themed short so I began to look at other unconventional approaches to Christmas, when I did I came across this animation illustrated by Hugh Whyte and animated by ark G. Murphy and published by DigitalKick:

 

 

However after watching this one I discovered several routes I didn't want to go down. I didn't want to be really anti-Christmas , sad or boring. I also didn't want to use that limited sound. I want music... I think. Yet I did like the limited colour pallet. By this point I had designed a character (Which I will go into later and had fully rendered him but from here I began to question that approach.

 

Following this I tired searching for shorts that were in just one colour but it is proving harder than I thought. I want to do the whole animation in white and shaded in blue but I need to see if this is achievable with depth or if it becomes to difficult to differentiate between layers.