AA: Cake Shop Man Research

We did discuss our ideas for the cake/narrator guy in the animation, and we all seemed to have similar ideas but being able to collect and share visual research instantly really helped.

We have been using a lot of Pinterest for this project; I know exactly when someone has found something and I can view it straight away, instead of going off on one doing work and then seeing that they had completely different ideas; even if I am in charge of character/prop design, I want everyone to be completely happy with what we are animating, and I want to make sure that my stuff works with the story as well. The script has been written so I have a much better idea of the personalities of characters, but having that extra visual research is great.

A lot of our inital thoughts were to go with a very American sort of design - we want a typical, almost annoying American presenter sort of voice for the character, so the design has to work well with that. At the same time, it has to work with our child design, and we need to make sure that they still look like they are from the same show, so we have some Cartoon Network and other childrens' cartoon examples in there as well.

I also like how sharply dressed Professor Utonium (Powerpuff Girls) is; his design is definitely something that I will figure out while creating this character, since it could work well with the presenter kind of idea.

Fairly Odd Parents does well with some of their diverse body shapes which I would love to explore but we need to keep this design simple, especially if our animation ends up being a lot closer to 2 minutes. Still, I think that the show utilises shapes very well without over complicating things, and you can tell what the characters are like just from their designs, so this is a good thing to think about.

Another thing that I thought would be great to look at is Robert Valley's designs for Disney XD's Motorcity. Again, the use a lot of simple shapes - probably even simpler than some of Fairly Odd's at times. A few recent comments about the cake shop man have been that he should be tall, and possibly very angular, which is why I think that these characters are good to look at - exaggerating things like the height and angles is something that Valley does very well, although there are still characters the use a lot of curves shapes and work great, so there are a variety of shapes to look at in case I really want to go crazy. I do only have a limited amount of time before the pitch though, and I can change the designs afterwards but I want something solid to present for it so I might stick to more angles etc for now - depending on what works with the child design.