Pirates

One thing that helps make character designs more interesting, is if the individual characters are distinctly different from each other. Not just in the details, but in their overall graphical shapes.

Most of the regular monkeys in Marco Macaco are relatively similar, but our three villains are indeed represented by three different basic geometrical shapes. The President is an upside-down pyramid or triangle, Carlo is a big fat cone, while the Pirate Captain is more or less a ball.

Somewhat uncharacteristically, the director, Jan Rahbek, didn't have a clear vision for the Captain's design. So I made a few different suggestions before we finally went with the round, cuddly character. Here's a previous attempt at a more classic pirate captain look. The other guy is a discarded idea for the Old Woodoo Pirate (see his final design below).

Technically, the Captain's face was based on Marco's. Only this time, the mouth area was shortened a lot more than on the other derived characters, causing a bit more subsequent adjustments than usual. In order to further distance his design from Marco's, the Captain was fitted with the President's nose. And of course a week-old stubble to give hin the scruffy ungroomed quality of a desperado of the high seas.

Like  many of the local monkeys on the island, all the pirates had bare feet. Luckily, monkey feet look a lot like hands, så all we had to do was convert Marco's hands to feet by mounting them a bit differently on the legs.

Here is a series of movie stills of the terrifying Pirate Captain.

The Crew
On the pirate ship the Captain is accompanied by a motley crew of ragtag marauders, all brokenhearted and disillusioned with romance - until Marco comes along, that is.

On the "technical" sketches for the pirates you can see directions for the modeler on how to reuse various bodyparts from our main characters, mainly Marco and the President.

And here's a selection of movie stills showing the final pirates in action.