Character Reuse Galore!

Lineup of the five main characters in Marco Macaco by Dan Harder, 2010.

Given the financial constraints of the Marco Macaco feature production, the character modeling process was deliberately planned for maximum reuse between the characters. Hence, a Build-A-Bear-style system was devised in order to create models consisting mainly of other characters' body parts.

The core model was the main character, Marco, followed by the two villains, Carlo and the President, who both inherited Marco's eyes, ears and hands, but had alternative mouths setups. Carlo got a copy of the President's nose. Thus, for the heads, we had one type of eyes, ears and hands, two kinds of noses and three different mouth setups. The monkeys' mouth areas were by far the most expensive to produce because of the many blendshapes needed for the characters' expressions and ability to talk. All facial features could be reused in variable sizes and with a certain amount of distortion.

Lulu was entirely a variant of Marco, only with different proportions and new clothes. So was the Captain who, however, received a nose from the President. The bodies of Carlo and the President were unique, but pretty much everyone else's were reused in all sorts of manners. Overall we had four types of bodies to make combinations from: normal, strong, big and fat. All existed both in a dressed version and one with a naked torso (for the pirates and a number of local monkies). We had two kinds of legs, one with shoes and one barefoot. There were long trousers and shorts, long sleeves and T-shirts. The sleeves of all jackets were somehow derived from the President's (which were in turn stolen from the Disco Worms villain, Tony Dean). Monkey kids were made by shrinking the mouth and nose region and enlargening the eyes. And so on and so forth. The cast also included some turist pigs, which were all built from the same template, just with different clothes and accessories.

Confused?

You won't be after a quick peek at this simple chart, clearly describing the pattern of reuse.

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.

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.

The President

The Monkey Island in Marco Macaco is ruled by a ruthless dictator, the President, whose security interests are Marco's most passionate concern. Whereas Lulu's model is basically a modification of Marco's, the President has a completely new type of monkey face, which is in turn reused for a number of other characters, such as pirate monkies and some incidental characters.

Early sketches of the President by Jan Rahbek, 2009.

President suggestions by Teddy Kristiansen and Kim Hagen, 2009.

As with Lulu, preliminary sketches had been done by Jan Rahbek, Kim Hagen and Teddy Kristiansen. As you can see, my final design didn't deviate much from the early ideas. I exaggerated the shoulders to make his body shape more triangular, and after a few attempts settled on the funny long muzzle. I kind of like the graphical quality of the mouth, something that is not often seen in CGI animation.

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.

Marco Macaco Character Design

I don't think I'm offending anybody if I say that the Marco Macaco feature (aka Carlo's Casino) is probably the weirdest movie I have ever worked on. At the same time it is also one of the best looking.

Marco Macaco movie poster, 2012

Considering the budget (less than 3 million dollars) it is down right amazing what the team of artists achieved on this project.

With an average footage requirement per animator of 16 seconds (24 feet) a week, the animation is really quite good (not least thanks to the animation director Tonni Zinck). The backgrounds, mostly built in 3D, have been further enhanced by beautiful hand painting, giving this CGI feature a fresh style and unique atmosphere, which easily outshines movies with price tags many times higher.

The movie (released 2012) was produced by the Danish studio Nice Ninja, which also created the feature Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms, released 2008 (back then the studio was called Radar Film).

On this production I was once again entrusted with the task of doing the character designs. Just like on the Disco Worms, some preliminary designs had already been done when I arrived on the project. And this time too, the main character, Marco, had already been modeled in 3D, based on some loose sketches done by the film's director, Jan Rahbek.

 

Early Marco sketches by Jan Rahbek, 2009.

Hugo Character Design

The design of the Hugo character - the star of the three feature movies that bear his name - has undergone quite a development from the original sketches to the last movie (which was done in CGI). In this post I will share with you some sketches and modelsheets relating only to the first feature movie, which was released in 1993.

It should be noted, of course, that the design for Hugo was originally conceived by Carl Quist Møller, the son of Hugo's inventor Flemming Quist Møller, who co-directed the movie with Stefan Fjeldmark. Carl, who also ended up animating on the first feature, has a very nice description of how Hugo was originally designed for a radio play and an illustrated children's book on his own website. And during his studies for the book illustrations Carl actually animated a short movie with Hugo in a somewhat crude but charming style. The film was run on Danish television in 1987 as an ad for the radio play.

When the idea arose to turn Hugo into a classically animated feature, Carl also participated in the redesigning of Hugo. But it was Stefan Fjeldmark who adapted Hugo into a more Disney-like character, as shown on these early modelsheets from 1991.

Disco Worms Character Design

After trippin' a bit down memory lane, let's fast-forward to the (almost) present:

The project "Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms" (produced by Radar Film in 2007/08) instantly appealed to me. The whole notion of a bunch of worms forming a band and playing disco music is inherently hilarious! I was initially hired just to do some storyboards, but quickly got sucked down the slippery slope of my own spinelessness. I just love disco music, and worms are... well, also quite interesting.

Early sketch of Barry and Tito by Teddy Kristiansen.

When I arrived on the project, preliminary sketches had already been done for most of the characters (by Kim Hagen and Teddy Kristiansen). And the main character, Barry - named after a famous falsetto-singing disco superstar who, according to a reliable source, refused to have one of his songs included in the movie's soundtrack because of a worm being named after him - had by then been modeled in 3D.

However, the 3D model still didn't have any facial expressions. But because of the tight production schedule, the animators were already starting up on the first sequence, which meant that they were forced to animate the basic body action with the pupils' movements as the only element of facial acting.

So I threw myself at the challenge of designing mouth and eye shapes for the existing Barry model. None of us really had too much experience with advanced 3D character setups, so we were sort of just learning on the fly. In retrospect it is clear that we went about it all wrong, building a series of fixed expressions instead of a more flexible kind of system like those used everywhere today. But hey, we got the job done.

These are some of the sketches indicating to the modelers how to build Barry's facial blendshapes (as you can see, I moved from drawing on paper to working on a Wacom Cintiq on this production).