Character Ideas

 

As the Director, Charlie already had a few ideas for his star character, Lilith. The character of Lilith and the pre made puppet he had produced were the main influence for the script - so it was a big feature in my design. He said he imagined the character like Luci from Disenchantment, and so I tried to merge the two together. My first attempt took the long noodle arms from Luci and used them in a Dr Seuss way, which I liked as it complemented the curved horns and large eyes - which were inspired by Tim Burton. My second attempt was elongating the face, but with the Tim Burton eye shadow and the horns, it looked more like a cow skull head rather than a creature like in the model. 

My final take was inspired by Luci's small height and the idea that lots of the powerful sidekicks in films are short and round - such as Pikachu from Pokémon, or King from The Owl House. I thought this design was too short and won't fit in some of the frames we had planned in the script - such as them all sitting at a table. 

I decided I liked the original the best as it merged all of the concepts nicely.

The Therapist was mostly based off of a design Naomi had made during our call as we were discussing the script. Both of us had used semi circle features in our design so we decided to maintain that. Her idea was based on the Dad from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs with curly hair and a monobrow. We decided that the therapist had lots of complex dialogue in the script that would all be during our stop motion portion - and so we thought a large moustache would be good to save us from lip sync. Charlie thought the nose Naomi had designed was too reaper-like and so I used Gru as a reference for a good size in their kind of face shape. I also used Gru for an alternative more therapist like clothing design - but Charlie wanted a suit shirt and pants, which is what we ultimately went with. 

As a group, we had already planned out that Lilith would have red skin and Sandy would have pink skin to be a mixture between an irregular demon tone and a human skin tone. And so, I knew our therapist was our only moment for inclusion in our animation.

All of the characters have curls on them, in their ears, Lilith's belly button and the therapist's hairs to show cohesion to the Dr Seuss and Tim Burton styles. 

The only directions for Sandy were to base her off of Tim Burton and to give her red hair, but we decided to make her skin pink too show her mixed household. To show that she was a mixture of both houses, I gave her the demon nose, as well as underdeveloped demon horns. Her ears are the same as the therapist's with swirls in the centre. I gave her three fingers and a thumb on her hand as opposed to the human therapist with four fingers and a thumb, and Lilith with three demonic fingers. Sandy's fingers are pointed and long like Lilith's, but they have knuckles. With the modern time frame, Sandy became an e girl, very on trend, and so the converse and the dress were a big part of the design and one of the main ways to bring in the red colour palette of the Hazbin Hotel. Hazbin were also a main reference for me to learn how to position women's faces, as I mostly draw men.