Background Character Designs

While we were in the process of making the short film, we knew we would be needing background characters for some reason or another. Whether it was to aid with escaping the circus to find Finn or to just have others in the background.

From left to right: Lizzo, Arnie, Cher, Mike, and Harold

Technically Arnie was my first design, but her original sketches looked a lot like the character Steven from Steven Universe

blended with a lion. I don't know where the first sketch was, but this was the next version of her design. I really liked the idea of a lion human type of character so they ended up getting multiple tries before making it into the final design.

The next three:

(or technically the first three to make the cut)

The next character was Lizzo. My thought process behind them was to create a big brother-type character. I wanted them to have a soft face but also be tall and lanky. I think I was kind of thinking about Yoshi when making them too, but oh well. Originally his colors were going to be really dim (lol get it, that's the name of the film XD). We did end up making him brighter because he interacts with Finn quite a bit.

Mike, the one that made a funny appearance in our animatic. Apparently, my round cyclops character named Mike was easily mistaken for another, more famous round cyclops character from a bigger film. So for the first part of the animatic, Mike was drawn with a strong resemblance to the movie star Mike Wazowski. Then like halfway through the artist realized that there was a difference between the Mikes so they switched to my Mike. We were hoping that it wouldn't get noticed, but while we were presenting one of the professors exclaimed "Mike Waxzowski" and we were caught.

Then finally, for the first batch of background characters is Harold. I had a lot of satyr vibes from them but I wanted to mix it up so I mixed up the nose and I gave him an extra eye. I almost wanted to give them goat pupils, the rectangular kind, but that was too much for the background character. The focus needs to be on the main characters, but I didn't want to lack giving my backgrounds some fun too.

The final two:

This is when I brought Arnie back and really tried to give her a look to make it into the film. At first, they didn't have wings and instead of a scorpion tail, it was a lion's tail. It was suggested that I should add more animals into their mix, so I made her a Manticore. She might be a little complicated, but that's okay.

Then for our final gal, Cher. I wanted to make a small nerdy girl with huge glasses. I really enjoy the trope where the characters who need glasses basically don't have normal eyes because haha they're blind. I wanna say she's around Rory's age, but I don't have all those specifics. She did end up looking a little too human, so I gave her horns and a tail, but then she looked too similar to the main characters. I ended up taking away her tail and giving her more animalistic ears.

I ended up going back through my sketchbook and I found some more of my designs. These ones were ones that didn't make it into the final product, but you can see that some things did translate into other characters.