The second school year has started busily. We are learning the secrets of teamwork and in Spring 2015 our class will produce 3 unique short animations. The first step was that each member in the teams had to write their own story, then we voted which story was best, to take to the next level. Well, my story was not picked and I must keep everything a bit of an secret from everyone for some months. I can only reveal this much: it’s going to be amazing :).

But until the huge premier, oscar nomination, fame and glory, I can show the characters I made for my story. He is called Daniel Reapersson and he happens to be the son of Death himself!

Synopsis:
Death wants to teach his professional skills to his son. Son of Death does not want to step into his father’s shoes as the son is very live-love-laugh kind of a person and he respects all living things. Ordered to kill a duck the son rebels against his father, however his rebelion backfires and he accidentally kills the duck. Neither the boy nor the duck cannot escape their fates.

Concept illustrations of the characters:

During this Autumn we have been studying more about how to make characters and how to animate them, so I continued working with Daniel for learning purposes. I am still not sure if I am going to implement this story as a cartoon or an animation some point in the future.

The images below show some of Daniel’s stages. From a simple topology to ready-rigged model. During the course we went through steps on how to make our own rig from scratch, but due to the time limit I decided to use a pre-made rig with Reapersson. (Rig (c) Jaro Lehtonen, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences).

Ready(ish) character images: