Project #4 Exquisite Corpse:
Daniel, Just Do It
*Hover over the slider and buttons to play around with the features of the suit* *Hover over the big red button on the bottom to reset helmet color*
Description
These are the three sketches I used to create our little hero.
Leftmost is my own creature. Their story goes as follows:
- this is your 14 year old neighbor. they’ve always struggled with indecisiveness, so absolutely fell in love with Nike’s tagline: Just Do It. they try to live by it, but have yet to embody the motto besides by exclusively wearing swooshed apparel everywhere they go.
- My robot is drew based on my favorite kitchen supplies, which have been my best friends since the quarantine time.
- Their name is Daniel and they are hopelessly in love with the idea of rainy days, but unfortunately they live in Arizona. Optimistic as ever, Daniel dons a rain jacket and boots every day in hopes of manifesting the perfect rainy day.
Design Process
Each of our teammates started by keeping our own drawing's head as a starting point to creating an excuisive corpse. Then, I took from Lynette's torso and Myles' legs each.
Compositing the three parts into one image, I realized it looked somewhat like a collage of different characters from the 2007 animation, Meet the Robinsons.
This helped me come up with a new, hybrid identity for the new creature as an ordinary child turned into a child superhero with some help of ingenious inventions.
Meet our 14 year old neighbor, Daniel. Daniel has consistently struggled with chronic indecisiveness since a young age. Frustrated with his indecisiveness, when he stumbles upon an armor looking device in his garage one day after school, he just decides to try it on.
With their arms getting covered in gears and a tail growing, it doesn't take a long time for them to process that this is a super hero suit. Frankly speaking, Daniel is really overwhelmed by this suit. They've always dreamed of acquiring superpowers, but how would they know which power, and more importantly, what their superhero gear would look like? And what is this awkwardly short, dangly tail? To Daniel's relief, they find a few different controls on the front as well as the back of the suit, which let Daniel decide on the length of the tail as well as the color of their helmet. They can also reset the color to the color of their signature sweatshirt with the reset button. There's still a bunch of buttons to figure out on the back, but Daniel is generally content with the fact that there's no need to decide on crucial details of their superhero suit.
Reflection
The process of combining different parts of classmates' sketches to form a singular creature and a cohesive backstory was really fun! I'm interested in character design, but often lack fun ideas – doing similar activities with friends and classmates will be a good way to ideate for a new character.
With more time, I would've added more custom effects and controls to the suit that would incorporate more dynamic animaitons – i.e. in the background.