Pitch Progress

Well, with an in-house Nelvana life getting further and further behind me, and with the first pitch of this property less than a month away I've been putting all my time into getting it ready.

I have the pilot episode written and roughed out in storyboards, and I'm just going through all the characters once more before I do the final boards and start putting my bible together.

Here are some of the latest redesigns:

Brash Haladay, Private Investigator (previously Brash Hannigan, Canadian Customs Agent)


Since he's the main character, I did more revamps on him than any other character. All the changes were pretty thouroughly thought through. I was happy with the first design (far left), but realized that a character like that would be difficult to animate properly. I also got some not-so-enthusiastic feedback from several sources, so I decided even though I liked it, it'd be best to give it another shot.

With the second design I got the body right, but the head was still giving me trouble. Since this guy's kind of a 'Dirty Harry' type guy, I made him squint to the point that his eyes disappeared. A nice idea, but I changed it later on because it would be very limiting when I'm trying to portray emotion.

Between the third and forth design I thought I had it. I changed the colour of his suit because he was looking a little too much like Stan from 'American Dad' and the father from a Nickelodeon show called 'The X's'.:

In the final (hope hope) revision, I made the arms shorter and less simian, made his face less generic with more 'rough and tumble' copishness, and changed the colour of his suit. The colour change is due to the fact that even though the show explores all different regions of the world, it takes place mainly in California. I want Brash to stand out amidst the glitz and glamour and green and palm trees, so I gave him a seventies-style tan suit.


Next up is Sect-C Marty, the alien counterpart.

This character was a bit harder to play with. I had some pretty strict ideas about how I wanted him to look. I wanted him to be green, I wanted him to have black eyes, I wanted him to have a metal suit and I wanted him to have antenna. Things I had to shy away from was him looking too much like Invader Zim:

..and him looking too intelligent or too dumb.


Here's one of the villains. His name is 'the Guvna'. Again, I had some musts about this character. I didn't want him to be a white guy (too many whities on the show already), I wanted him to be sporting a handlebar moustache, and I wanted him to look very, very stereotypically Australian.

I changed him from the original design mainly because he didn't really have his own style. His body was the same shape as Brash's, and he was just a bit too generic. So I made him a little rougher around the edges, a little fatter and most importantly a completely different shape and attitude than Brash. Also, I thought that first design looked like a british diplomat ready for a safarri adventure.

That's all for now. I have three more characters to revise and then I'll be doing background and tertiary characters for the episode "Brash & Sect-C Get Chile" before doing the final storyboarding for it.

Cheers,

-Brett