The Red Border
This was a group project for the Visual Development minor at St. Joost. In the minor, we developed stories up to the point they could be pitched and maybe funded to produce.
Synopsis:
It is around 1900, and a radioactive asteroid hits Europe. The collision causes a massive earthquake that destroys nearly everything on the planet, and everything that survived that was close enough to the hit zone started mutating because of the radiation. In the story, we follow a traveling circus that tries to bring happiness back to this destroyed and dangerous world. The journey is dangerous though. In the search for a safe haven, they travel through the land in which mutated animals have taken over. Will they make it?
My role
My main job was creature design. I had to figure out how the mutation changed the animals. Did it just turn them all green, or would they grow extra limbs? After that, I did animal studies. Which animals could they encounter, and what do they really look like? I made concepts, and later when a style was chosen, I had to make designs that fit.
Process below
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First sketch and mutation variations of a wolf.
Animalstudie of a bear and a first mutaion version.
More versions of what te mutation could be.
I tried the favorite concept with the bear on a beaver this time, and it ended up too much like a zombie, so I changed the colour of the mutations to red. The red details on the animals became one of the reasons we called the mutated zone "the red border".
The idea of what the mutation did was pretty clear at this point. After the frog was finished, the style was chosen. The art director wanted more shape-heavy and simpler designs. A brush was chosen, and we would work with blue shading. Luckily for me, a frog is pretty much a jumpy triangle, So I didn't have to change much.
