Lurk - Character Designs

   It has been quite some time since I designed Sister Diawara and the other characters, aside from a few alterations to her outfit, she hasn't necessarily changed that much as compared to the rest. Her incredibly colorful outfit contrasts to her calm demeanour, I was especially inspired by a photo of a Cuban priestess who covered herself from head to toe with all sorts of jewellery. And for a moment, I was almost tempted to give Diawara incredibly long decorated nails too (Something which the Cuban priestess also happened to have), but decided against it as she still needed to stay mobile. Sister Diawara was also initially depicted as barefoot in the older concepts. And while it cannot really be seen in the latest character sheets, Diawara now sports a pair of sandals. 

   Father Alex in contrast to Sister Diawara, was my least favorite character design of them all, while I eventually stuck with a look for him during my first version of the project, I just found no appeal whatsoever to him. As a character, while he couldn't necessarily keep his cool, he was still a kind man that did his absolute best to keep the other survivors safe, and is someone that they can still turn to for reassurance and comfort. And so next to Jessie, Father Alex would have been the most human character in the cast.
   
   Before adding the beard, I found myself double checking on whether priests were actually allowed to keep beards (Seeing as so much images showed clean shaven priests). Aside from making him fairly distinguished, I believe that this was one of the things that finally made Alex a little more interesting and appealing without having to make him appear as outlandish as Sister Diawara. His look was especially based on actor Jake Gyllenhaal. And while I wasn't going to necessarily flash out all of their backstories, I wanted to show that each character had so much more to them than what is shown on screen.

   Jessie went through the most changes out of all the original characters. Seeing as she is the main character, it was important to make her more pleasant to look at whilst playing as her (You know what I mean). Originally named Felicity, I felt that it sounded a tad old and that it just did not suit her, and so, I decided to name her after my best friend (Who happens to be a boy).

   She has also changed a lot appearance wise. Her hair was made much shorter, and there was an attempt to give her a slightly more stylish or at least more appealing looking wardrobe (As compared to the toddler-style outfit she wore in the older concepts as shown below). The game also happens to take place around autumn and so it made sense to dress her in something warmer as well.

   Felicity's mother, Helen Marshall was a inspired by a mixture of several female Silent Hill characters (Dahlia Gillespie, Claudia Wolf, Magaret Holloway and Lilian Shepherd). When tweaking and polishing her design a little more, I referred to photos of actresses Alice Krige (Who played Christabella in the first Silent Hill movie) and Julianne Moore (Who played Margaret White in the latest Carrie flm adaptation). It was obvious that I had wanted to depict her in a catatonic state by the time the game's storyline actually starts, and it was just a challenge balancing out the unnerving and... well, motherly aspects about that will still make the player want to seek her out throughout the game.

Lurk - Working on the Cinematic 3

   Very much like the motel room scene at the beginning, I took some time to add more details to this underground subway tunnel. The characters were of course drawn in more detail as well (Compared to the stick figures in the concept art). This just gave me the opportunity to include Sister Diawara and Father Alex in another scene (Funny that his face isn't shown once again, however).

   It was from here that I tried to decide what other key scenes I should include within such a short span of time. I reluctantly wounded up dropping the soldier encounter and exploration scene in the end to at least include one scene with a monster in it (The static montage at the beginning doesn't necessarily count). I had hoped to include more, but once again was short on time (This was also another monster design I need to draw up clearly for my concept art book, most of the other monsters didn't seem like the shrieking sort and so I had to quickly design up another one).

   The last scene I wanted to keep was of Jessie's mother as she is staring at her (Or perhaps, at you) from across her seat in the train carriage. She appeared too sweet in the original drawing that I used for the animatic, and so aside from fixing her pose a little, I had to fix up her face a little. I am a little saddened that some of her beauty was taken away in this new version, but I think a creepiness factor was far more important for this scene (And that bloody looking shading on her cardigan was completely unintentional).

Resketching her pose.

Lurk - Working on the Cinematic 2

   This was a scene that stuck with me even during the early days of Lurk, and seeing as I couldn't fully animate them, I had to make their poses stand out (Strong poses, right?) as much as possible, which was a huge challenge. While Father Alex was a toughie to draw simply because of my rusty drawing skills, Sister Diawara was the bigger challenge. 

   I have long since characterised her as an eccentrically calm character as compared to everybody else, and so I had the toughest time figuring out what pose to give her without actually making her out of character (Not that anyone would know what her character was like... EXCEPT FOR ME). When I get around to animating this scene, I'm definitely going to video tape some references for it as well.

  The background itself was a heavily altered photo that I took of my friends' creepy basement (And I mean creepy, I seriously wish I could have used more of the photos I took of that place for this project).

   Another scene that I had to scrapp would have introduced the next key character to the series. Seemingly your stereotypical soldier and practically the only one competent to defend themself against such creatures, this soldier encounters Jessie in 3/4 ways of the plot. While the original design had been a male soldier named Peter, I found myself growing more interested in designing a female solder, which I will discuss more about in the character design post. But, as you can see, I thought I could have hidden his or her face for the time being for this scene, before of course excluding it from the cinematic.

   And here was the bit from the animatic that I had attempted to animate.

Lurk - Working on the Cinematic 1

Original Concept Art

   For the first scene, I didn't make all that many changes to it based on the animatic from the previous post, I just cleaned up and redrew a few details on the television. After wasting my time trying to remember how to use After Effects (When you are rushing, it's obvious that you can refamiliarise yourself or experiment as much as you would like), I ended up designing a seperate static montage, erased out the white screen, and placed the television later on top of it.

   I practically did the same for motel room design, cleaning up and adding in some more details insead of leaving it as a blurry charcoal-looking mess (And so I had the chance to mess around with some more brushes other than the usual hard brush that I have grown so accustom to using). I definitely could have added in more details (Such as perhaps making it rain outside the window), but I know I had to hurry on and work on other scenes and so left it as it is. Getting the lighting was the trickest part for this scene, as I was never necessarily sure how much of the area would be lit up by the television, or whether I should just make some creative decisions by showing more of the room than I should.

   In my rush, I simply drew a still image of Jessie once the camera pans out to show her outside of the room. As suggested however, I ended up redrawing her and attempted to add a tiny bit of animation by making her e--

OH SWEET LORD.

   To finish up the overall look of this scene, I messed around with a few texture and layer options. Now, while I am discussing these scenes in order, that doesn't mean that I actually did them in order (HAH!). Before I went back to finish up this scene, I experimented with a texture overlay for another scene and found myself enjoying the color and feel it actually gave to it (Which I will show in the next post) and so decided to do the same for this scene along with a few others. 
   
   The scene that would have followed after that was a close up of her as she shifts about restlessly as she attempts to call her father on her phone. Aside from lack of time, a fully animated scene would once again not go with the rest of the cinematic's simplified movements (Which you will see more of in the next post). I would of course love to animate this scene one day and put together a proper animation as I had originally intended, but for now...

   This scene was also scrapped for the same reasons, I had spent days figuring out her pose (You can't imagine the awful (In more ways than one) stuff I find when googling 'unconcious girl', also, I had no idea you can fall unconcious with your eyes open) as she lays on the ground before deciding to scrap it all completely. While I had attempted to keep the scene where she would come to and look at around for a moment... you probably know what became of that too...

   I know that she looks pretty different here as compared to the previous scene, hopefully the similar pose still clued you in that they are actually the same person. I was happy with the slightly 3D-ish look the wall has.

I still really do like how my sketch for this turned out, though.
So again, one day... ONE DAY.

   

   And this was the new version, a still illustration with some flickering lighting and a shadow passing over her... It doesn't look too bad, I guess.. It was also here that I began to realise how difficult it was to make her poses appear natural with such large scarf/poncho wrapped around her top half. Future considerations is that I will have to take reference photos if when I finally get the chance to come back to this concept.

Changes to Dissertation

   Possibly the shortest post I will actually post on here, I have made a lot of changes to my dissertation within a very short space of time. Thanks to my friend, I was able to realise that I was attempting to cover too much and needed to restructure the entirety of my essay, seeing as it was practically all over the place without any sort of flow. And while I cannot necessarily say that the present version is perfect, I think I have made a huge improvement with my 5000 newly written words. I decided to remove several examples and replace them with ones that I was more enthusiastic about writing from the very beginning, some titles will be mentioned, but only for a few paragraphs if they are not the particular examples that I want to focus heavily upon.

   Hopefully I can get the finished draft done by this afternoon as I hope to get my lecturer and friend to reread through it before I go off to get it printed on Friday (Speaking of which, isn't there class on that day? Ah well, I'm sure they will still let us go). As for my practical piece... I will write about it in another post.

Lurk - Monster Designs

   Progress for my practical has been a little slow (Due to me falling ill for most of Christmas break), so chances are that I might be simplifying my animation and turning it into more of a 2D cinematic than a fully animated piece. So this will allow me to incorporate the concept art that I already have and simply animate it with the use of After Effects. While I initially hoped to get some fully animated scenes done as well, I am beginning to think that fully animated scenes and scenes with more basic motions will not go well with one another... I will worry about that later once I actually more work done for it.

   Rosy has already started on the title sequence, and so far it's looking pretty sweet. I should however pick up the pace and show a bit more work to my composer so that he will be given more time to work on the music and sound (Which is now all that much time left). Anyway, as the title pretty much says, here are some of the monster designs that I have done for the concept bible itself, obviously not all of them will be included within the animation, which gave me the opportunity to work on more detailed pieces to showcase within the book itself (Seeing as I have no need to worry about animating them all).

   I hope to give them all an unsettling sort of appearance, aside from the expected body horror, I have begun looking into some examples that take advantage of the Uncanny (An issue that could have been applied to the monsters in horror video games more often, when I think about it).

Moodboards

   So not much has changed in terms of my inspiration for Lurk, but just for comparison sake, I decided to place the old moodboard that I had made during the end of PPP1 (That I can still make full use of) alongside the new ones that I have quickly put together. I am still aiming for the monochromatic look with an unsettling atmosphere and ambience than a full out gore fest, but have decided to include examples from both. More stylistic games (That also happen to be indie games) are also included here as they have inspired me in terms of their more unique approaches and even more unique storytelling.

First mood board from nearly 2 years back, I am still remaining pretty faithful
to the selection of styles I have shown here.

A new mood board featuring an array of horror games that have gone for the more realistic if not
photorealistic look. While "Silent Hill" remains one of my main inspirations for my project,
games that tend to feature the 'little kid companion/partner' trope have also become a huge part
of my reference, not many of these however were able to succeed in creating that empathy
much like "The Last of Us", "Telltale's The Walking Dead" and even "Resident Evil: Revelations 2"
has done.

More stylistic games that are not particularly of the traditional horror genre. Most
of these games however have succeeded in breaking away from the norms and cliches
of many large company produced horror games (Sorry, guys!), and so are great examples
for when I am working on Lurk's storyline and narrative.

Group Feedback

   While I didn't necessarily have much to show for today's silent critique, feedback from my peers have been surprisingly and incredibly positive. My friends are absolutely excited on seeing more concepts (I was absolutely astounded when they were listening to intently to the plot whilst I explained it in the worst manner possible) and of course, the end products themselves (The creature concepts in particular were well received and were even compared to the likes of "Silent Hill" and "Dark Souls").  I do believe that I will even be able to collaborate with one of them in creating a title animation for the teaser trailer itself!

   Particularly helpful feedback that I wish to keep track of are:

• Consider the back designs of the characters and creatures more, seeing as the concept is visualised as a third person game and that we will be seeing their backs a lot.
• Consider audio for the animatic/animation itself (Seeing as there will be no voice acting, it would be wise to properly focus on other areas of audio such as music and sound effects).

   Once I get most of my dissertation written next week (After Manchester Animation Festival, most probably), it's back to working on more concepts. But just to keep track of things, what I will probably need to do next for my practical is:

• Character Concepts
• Creature Concepts
• Setting Concepts
• Mock Screenshots/Scene Visuals
• Rough Storyboard
• Record some quick Video References
• Animatic with some finished animation clips in there (I will especially have to send this to my composer as soon as I can to give him enough time to work on it)

   There is still a lot of other things to worry about, such as the academic poster, getting everything finished in time for printing, so hopefully I can be more productive once I get back from the festival.