Steampunk Revisited

Well after another talk with my tutor on the direction of the next project, it seems that I’ve decided to body swerve a full animated piece, in favour of some shorter (but hopefully more polished) pieces for now. And those of you who've followed me previously might be glad to hear this me and I will be revisiting  the realms of the Steampunk genre once more in a series of short character intros, suitable for the use in both games or TV the likes of which are shown here http://stormhawks.ytv.com/default.aspx?obj=CHARACTER&id=1 on the website of the children's TV show ‘Storm Hawks’.

Initially I had never intended to delve back into my Steampunk work, but it seems that my previous work last semester, whilst nice, lacked any sort of grungy dirty feel to it.... it all looked to new and pristine if you will. And it seems that my previous work on this genre was rather successful to say the least with Steampunk being a rather up and coming kind of genre and growing in popularity.

So with the suggestion of perhaps designing a daring duo of adventurers I set about researching until I remembered there were a few characters I’d designed previously, who I’d felt I’d rushed, thrown to one side and never looked at again, but who held great potential, obviously were I to re-design them afresh, stripping them away to the very basic concepts and rebuilding them with more thought.

And so I have decided upon my two characters for this semester’s work: The geeky mechanic girl, and the Clockwork man.

Clara – A goggle wearing, ever enthusiastic, explorer with a passion and talent for machines. At the same time she is rather useless with the other aspects of life such as human interactions or domestic skills. She is known to be reckless at times and is almost guaranteed to speak without thinking and say the exact wrong thing. Her gentle naivety whilst quite endearing makes life hard work for her shipmate.

To sum it up, I wanted to make a female character who was neither completely stereotypically pathetic and in need of ‘saving’ all the time, nor stereotypically macho and super duper fighter who speak 50 languages is super smart and is better at everything than all of the boys whilst still strikingly gorgeous etc etc yadda yadda heard it all before. Because NO ONE is like that.

 Instead I wanted a more HUMAN female character, a bit nerdy, a bit hopeless at times, has something she’s good at but is a bit rubbish at other things too, and not in a ‘only has one flaw such as ‘being a bit clumsy’ but it only makes her cuter’ kind of way.

Jeminius aka Jem – A timid and well spoken young man Clara met on her travels. He lost his right arm, foot and half of his face in a terrible locomotive accident.  A passing doctor helped rig him up with some mechanical parts to help him function better; but without the knowledge to properly maintain his new body, he has found himself swept into Clara’s crazy world of adventures, providing a helping hand around the ship, and the occasional bit of brilliant marksmanship, in exchange for her mechanical knowledge.

For the male character, a concept I’d previously really wanted to explore more was that of a half robotic (but steampunk rather than cyborg) man. He’d be completely reliant on the female character at times to do maintenance work on his robotic parts, and so much against his will he’s dragged around on ‘adventures’ which, though he complains about as he is a bit cowardly, he secretly enjoys.

The idea of animating and portraying a character that has for example a face half cobbled together from robotic pieces fascinates me. May a time characters are used that have robotic limbs and such to show they’re tough and battle scarred, but instead I wish with this character to portray someone who was once probably a regular person, but perhaps was involved in a terrible accident and now has to rely on their robotic pieces to function. And as a result of this, they are instead a more timid wary character.

In contrast to the female who is great with machines, he knows nothing of how to maintain his body, but in return he looks out for and provides companionship to her; often making up for her lack of social skills.

Also in contrast to many robotic characters who often seem to just have their extra parts ‘tagged on’ but function completely normally. I want the character to have half of his face, the mechanical part, to be completely frozen and non-functioning. Partially due to lack of realism in the many robotic or part robotic characters I’ve seen whose face’s stretch and deform as if the metal parts are simply drawn onto their skin. This is highly unrealistic and looks rather lame. And also partially as I think it would provide a real challenge to show emotion and have the viewer/player empathize with this character if for example he is unable to smile or frown or whatnot with one half of his face, due to it being welded to a large piece of metal.

Plus it’d be fun to rig and animate some cool moving gears and such on a character.

Character designs to follow when I finalise them, but dependant on how quickly I can mange them Clara may be the only one to get done and leave Jem in reserve.

If by some miracle I get BOTH done (highly unlikely) then I may add a THIRD character. His Majesty the Cat. He serves no real purpose other than to be fat and sarcastic (communicator/translator device, NOT talking feline) and have to float about with some sort of jet pack 'cause hes too fat to walk.