from the vaults

I was talking to Alfredo and Alessandra (god I hope I spelt that correctly!) about the character designs and how people were finding the 2d/3d flat style hard to grasp.
I was talking about the journey we took from "Rebel" which was the project Brendan grew out of , which had very Hercules-type soft modeled designs to the flat style we final settled on.

This is something I touched on a little bit in earlier posts....anyway hope its interesting....

I did most of the visual development on the characters over the period 2003 (when we began to rework the project as "Brendan" ) until 2005 when Barry Reynolds came back from his wanderings and made the final designs and model sheets of the main characters with me. He really unified everything , and tied the style together, but at first even he had a hard time getting the flat mediaeval thing in there. Someday I'll have to publish a book of the development art that spans almost 7 years but heres some samples to show the journey....

These are a little embarassing now, but its where I was at in 2003 - These were the first designs of Aisling and Brendan , somewhere between "Rebel" and where we ended up with the "Brendan" style.
Diane Le Feyer , a very talented animator who was in the studio at the time, did some of the Aisling sketchs , but these are basically the reworked designs I did for the Cartoon Movie trailer that year, when we represented the project as a "new" film , seperate to "Rebel".....