Maroon & Fern are two lizard-dragon-things.. I'm actually not sure what they are. I think they are dragons, since I was slightly inspired by How to train your dragon. They don't have wings though... and they don't breathe fire.. Or maybe they will, if I just make them to breathe fire. But according to what we know now, they don't breathe fire.
I'm getting sidetracked... Anyway, they are some kind of things with spikes and scales and sharp teeth. And they are twins. And now I'm getting ahead of myself..
Let's go back to the beginning. All started around March when we had a Maya basics class and we were supposed to model, rig and animate a character. I started to sketch some characters and I remember watching HtTYD trailers and I remember falling in love with the arms/forelegs of Toothless..
So, it all started with the arms. And eye brows. Or whatever they are on lizard, that part over the eye, they needed to be big.. I have some kind of fixation with big eye brows and eyes being deep in the face.. Dunno why.. Anyway.. after some sketching I came up with this:
I thought it looked good enough, so I started modeling.. But I was too lazy to scan the picture or make proper concept art.. So I flew blindly. The only reference I had was the idea in my head.. The first idea was to make some kind of little devil but the character I had sketched started to develop in my head and it got more horns and spikes and sharp teeth and it started to look like a dragon without wings, subconsciously who knows.
I was pretty happy with the outcome so I didn't mind it didn't look like the original character.
Next step was to rig the character. It went pretty well and the character works.. Kind of. I had some problems with the arms and legs.. There're certain poses that are simply impossible.. But what we can't do, we don't need to do. So the rig was good enough. And besides the whole character was done in two weeks or so.. And it's quite low-poly, so it works well enough.
The rig was ready so it was time to make some animation.. It was supposed to be pretty simple and not too long. I can't remember why but I wanted to take a sound clip from The Road to El Dorado, maybe I thought the voice of Tulio suited the character.. As it does. Anyway, there was two voices on the clip, Miguel and Tulio, so I needed another character. And since I like to keep things simple, I just made another color map for the character and voilà, a new character was born. At this point I just called them 'the red dragon' or Red and 'the green dragon' or Green. But because that was kind of too obvious I needed to make up new names. So I browsed wikipedia for the shades of red and found Maroon and the shades of green and found Fern. I also came up with a story for them. They are twins.. but total opposites of each other, now isn't that original.. :q Anyway, Maroon is kinda grumpy and pessimistic and he's easy to piss off. Fern on the other hand is pretty optimistic, easy-going and doesn't get mad too easily. If someone, like Maroon, tries to bug him, Fern just gives back the same and it's Maroon who ends up mad.
After the class I got the feeling that I want to use these characters again somewhere. So I got an idea to make a short film. I didn't have a story at that point yet but I decided that if I don't get a job for the summer I stay at school and work on the film. After some time I came up with the story and was even more eager to start. Luckily I got two of my classmates to work with me and it seemed that this could actually work out. Although I got a job for June, my companions were able to work on the film during that time since I had done everything ready for them before I left. And we discussed via internet so it worked fine eventhough I wasn't around to tell them what to do. And when I came back I could just start working on my own share.
And now, well, everything looks pretty good. We have someone to make the music and someone who does the sound editing. We're almost on schedule. And the whole thing should be ready in September. Hopefully.
Just one more thing I can tell you.. Besides Maroon & Fern the film will feature a bird called Bill. (Don't ask why such a name.) If you want to know more, you'll just have to wait till the release. ;)
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