Carlo

Baboon Carlo sketches by Dan Harder, 2010.

Nailing the design of Carlo, the primary villain of Marco Macaco, took a little back and forth before the director Jan Rahbek was happy. As you can see from the early sketches (below), a number of different ideas had already been floated prior to my arrival on the project.

Early sketches of Carlo by Jan Rahbek and Teddy Kristiansen, 2009.

Suggestions for Carlo by Kim Hagen, 2009.

In the end, since Carlo was the bad guy, we decided it was fitting making him a baboon (see sketches at the top of this post). We did want him to look a little bit weird, but still, giving him the big striped blue balloon-like cheeks of a real male baboon was just too extreme. So in the end we arrived at the slightly moderated, but still fairly odd design seen on the modelsheets below.

Final inspirational models for Carlo by Dan Harder, 2010.

Carlo's design made him the only unique character of the cast, in that no other character shares his full facial features. Even so, certain bodyparts were still reused from the original Marco model, including the eyes, ears and hands, and the nose was borrowed from the President.

Here are the "technical" sketches, followed by some facial expressions for modeling the blendshapes. As you can see, even Carlo is based on Marco's model to some extend.

Blendshape sketches for Carlo:

And here are some stills of the final Carlo in color. In the end, he didn't come out quite as extreme as intended. Especially the horse teeth overbite (see last blendshape sketch above) never made it to the final model. But still he is a pretty funny character.

Towards the end of the story, Carlo puts on a "virtual reality suit," with which he controls a giant casino robot. Here are the design sketches, followed by a few screen shots of the suit in action.