Character Design Development

Right at the end of Unit 1, I became entranced by Shinya Tsukamoto's 'Tetsuo: The Iron Man' [based off of a character from 1988 anime 'Akira'] and promised to myself that I would revisit this character concept at a later point. I wanted to explore the idea of human mutation through experimentation - voluntarily or not. The occurrence of a painful decent into the loss of oneself intrigued me.

Before even beginning to design a set, I came up with the inital drawings below - my head was entranced by the idea of a inhumanely large man cramped into the location I'd chosen [in light of . The narrow, claustrophobic nature of it would work so well. The man/subject displayed a sense of discomfort and anger as opposed to a vulnerable feeling of fear. It was from here that I came up with the experiment , pipework and subsequent viewing room. Ever since then, I have continued to develop this idea through research and

Above: Initial depictions of my character and set.

Above: Final design with character in place.

It was at the time where I created my set-design moodboard that I also put one together for my character [as seen below]. There are a huge range of works I'm a huge fan of included within this; Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Akira, The Matrix, the works of H.R.Geiger, Paul Rumsey & Ron Mueck. I've drawn together all of these references to illustrate this battery-farm attitude towards the character.

Above: Moodboard and colour-palette for the character design.

In addition to this, I later came across this sculpture at the Wellcome Collection titled "I Can Not Help the Way I Feel" [John Isaacs, 2003] which I thought would be a great help when trying to create an amorphous, mutating form.

Up until this point, I was mainly focused on the idea of complete obesity; transferring the commonly used visual symbol for monetary greed into an ultimate state of vulnerability. It was only when I visited The Royal London Hospital Museum that I decided to make a slight change to my design.

Above are a selection of the items there that documented rickets and Proteus syndrome. The mere sight of them sends such discomfort through an onlookers body; these are conditions extremely difficult to look at. I've decided to adopt this anatomical structure into my own character design by changing the body to show malnourishment with an abnormally large stomach. I plan to add lumps and skin deformities into the final blueprint drawing.

Below I have included a collection of illustrations made 2 months after the initial set shown above.

The next part of this unit is to dress ourselves as the character and act out a scene within our set-design model; the main task being the use of green screen technology to achieve this. However, the reality is that I would not be able to 'dress' myself as a inhumanely large naked male and if this were to be a real film with a full sized-set, the character would be CGI'd. In light of all of this, I have come up with the idea to create my character in the form of a puppet. This will be a huge thing to achieve within the next week or two, but I think I will have gained so many more skills.

Last year I befriended a marionettist called Raseed working under the name "The Gipsy Marionettist". He showed me around his studio full of beautiful wooden puppets and I had planned to create my own sort of thing in the future. After looking into creating a latex puppet, I realised that a wooden one would be a much quicker option. Seeing as my scaled-up prop doesn't require much physical work, I think this would be a great opportunity to learn some woodword skills.

All the while, I'll still be using the green screen to transport my character into the design. The puppet won't be small enough to fit straight into the set and I'm hoping to use green strings to animate the puppet which could then later be elimnated in the editing stage.

Below is a very brief diagram showing how I'd like the puppet to be composed; with the torso and upper arms & legs stationary - just the head and hands/feet to maneouvre.