The start of university second year and my summer assignment.

Well, I'm back from holidays which was fun but those times are over and its time to work! Over the summer we were given an assignment to create three misanthrope characters and create a front and side walk cycle for one of them.

So, since I didn't know what a misanthrope was, I had to do a little research into misanthropes. After a little time I found out that most villians in films are misanthropes, as they are people who hate or distrust other human beings. In my presentation I mentioned villians such as The Joker, Malificent, The Hulk, Lots O', Lord Voldemort etc... Most of these villians do not really have a motive for hating other people, they just don't like them. I did initially have an idea for an evil genius scientist who is really bad at inventing but I didn't have enough ideas for more villains so I decided to turn away from the villian aspect of misanthropes.
After doing a little more research I looked into common misanthropes that exist in normal society, which was how I came across the idea of goths, elderly people and the homeless. Goths are misanthropes because they choose to be different, they go against society by choosing to dress differently, wearing very dark colours and spikes all over their bodies making them look almost aggresive. This is how I came up with my gothic character 'Dawn'.

As you can see, she is a typical goth girl but is also incredibly shy due to being bullied at school. I decided to have her in her school uniform but add her own touch to her look with a jet black trenchcoat, a spiked neck choke and purple streaks in her hair. I like this design as she looks so innocent. Dawn doesn't hate other people, she just doesn't trust them.

My next idea was inspired by someone who is different than everyone else and as a result, doesn't trust anyone because no one understands him. This is when I came up with Kevin.

This is my first design for Kevin. I used a roundish body to resemble a human but it could never hide who he really is. He is the only robot living in a society existing entirely of humans making him untrustworthy because he is different. Kevin has a common office job in an attempt to fit in, carrying a brief case and wearing a leather hat which fits over his antenna. Kevin is a rather placid robot but his misanthrope feature comes into play when his AI side sometimes takes over as his orginal purpose was to destroy all humans.

Here is the second design of Kevin, I decided to remove the body and put his arms and legs on the head to give him an interesting shape. It would have been quite fun to animate this shape as the movement would have been very different compared to a normal body. Yet I still wasnt sure about it, and so I redesigned him a final time.

This was the third and final design of Kevin. I decided to stick with this design as it looks more like a stereotypical robot with a proper body that is square and very unhuman like which works well for this design. After some thought this would have been easier to animate compared to the last design as I would have just had to worry about the feet walking whereas in version two the whole body would have to twist to walk making animating much more difficult.

I realized that some elderly people are misanthropes, but against the youths around them. Everyone has heard of old people catagorizing all teenagers as 'hoodlems' and treating every single teenager the same. For some reason I have always found old librarians rather creepy, just the thought of someone breathing down your neck as you read just sends a shiver down my spine. Using this personal experience I was able to come up with my final character called Dorris.

This was my first design for Dorris, a 70 year old librarian who looks innocent at first, appearing old and frail with a limp and hands drawn up to resemble a dinosaur. She moves slowly through the isles, peering out through her oversized glasses at anyone who touches her books. If she sees you damaging her books she will move faster than anything you have seen and you will be out the door before you can blink. I took inspiration from the 'Monsters University' librarian for the fear factor through her temper and inspiration from the mother in 'Dispicable Me' for the appearence. However I wasn't quite happy with her shape, partically in her face shape so I redesigned her and came up with a design I was happy with animating.

This is the final design of Dorris. I completey changed her look apart from a few things such as the hair, the large glasses and the short stumpy legs. I decided to make her much rounder and it suited the stumpy old lady appearance I was going for. As well as this I made the body one large shape and just the head, arms and legs would move which would make animating a lot easier. I changed the colours of the clothing too so it was easier to see what was the skirt and what was the cardigan. Below are two links to Youtube showing my front and side walk cycles for Dorris.

side walk cycle- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD3KTZCcAAA&list=UUL8aU_V7gXMJjZyHlQEMuiA

front walk cycle- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XpiZzj-13M&list=UUL8aU_V7gXMJjZyHlQEMuiA&index=2