Getting Into Character

In my second year of animation at Sheridan, we had a couple individual short film projects that were entirely pre-production work. The first was entirely our choice, provided we pitched the idea to our classes. Mine was "Dion's Bar", a little gag-driven comedy that took place in a world half-way between modern reality and greek mythology. It's quite the existential story, now that I think about it. The name comes from the greek god of wine, Dionysus.

The three characters were Jakob Satyre, a sex-starved satyr, Bill O'Taur, a minotaur whose wife wants a divorce because of his alcoholism, and Andrea Griffith, a griffiness who likes to flaunt her stuff. It's clearly not a children's story. I wanted to try something that was a little more mature and a little less mature at the same time.




















The following are some other various model sheets for characters I've designed the past few years. The first two characters are from an animation class assignment. I ended up elaborating on the story when I designed the characters, and I'll definately want to use them again in the future, maybe even for my fourth year film, which third year animation students will begin thinking about this upcoming term. The title for the short would be "Mum's First Word".

Davius lives in his mother's basement...