Lulu

On the Marco Macaco feature, as on the Disco Worms, and again necessitated by the limited budget, extensive reuse was planned between the characters. The monkeys in the movie were confined to three major types (or races, if you will), the vast majority belonging to the same race as Marco. That was indeed the case for the female main character, Lulu.

Her initial rough design was done by director Jan Rahbek. More suggestions were made by designers Kim Hagen and Teddy Kristiansen. But as usual, Jan knew pretty much what he was looking for, so my final design didn't stray very far from his original vision.

Early sketches of Lulu by Jan Rahbek and Kim Hagen, 2009.

More Lulu sketches by Teddy Kristiansen and Jan Rahbek, 2009.

Inspirational modelsheet for Lulu by Dan Harder, 2010.

Instead of designing an entirely new model for Lulu, I simply drew some "technical" sketches right on top of the 3D model of Marco, which was then adjusted accordingly. Lulu's body was shortened, her entire mouth/nose area shrunk, as well as her ears, arms and hands. Different clothes, eyelashes and a set of small breasts were added. With these changes, all the facial blendshapes made for Marco could be transferred to Lulu with a minimum of adjustments.

Finally Lulu was equipped with rollerskates and a weird cone-like hairdo, which didn't need any hair simulation. As you can see from the inspirational sketches (above), she was originally supposed to wear a skirt, but again, in order to avoid expensive cloth simulation, we eventually opted for a pair of shorts.

This is a screen dump of the Lulu CGI model. The movie stills below show her final look in the film.