LAUAN603 : Big project #1 : Liam - 1

For my extended practice, rather than making an animation of my own, I tend to collaborate with multiple groups in creating their project, in the form of providing concept arts, character design and backgrounds, areas that I want to specialise in going forward. With that said, my first collaboration is with Liam Wilson and for his live-action short about a modern cowboy in a post apocalyptic world. My roles for this project includes first, designing the 'drones' - a prominent enemy within the short, and later on doing some backgrounds for the film. As the it is a live action, the background will have to be wait until they've finished shooting the film in order to match the weather and colour to the real settings. As a result, I got started with the drone first

As a starter , Liam gave me this mood board for the drone design ideas. In particular, I felt really inspired by the sphere-shape designs, something that has a very multi directional element to its functionality. Liam further detailed the gadgets include a grenade launcher, laser blasters and and tazer like arm. With this elements in mind I began by creating a series of silhouettes of the drone.

Both me and Liam was quite happy from the variety of shapes here, which gave us a lot of options to work from. For me, my favorite were 5, 12 and 8. 5 was directly inspired by the drones from Nier Automata, on of my favourite game design-wise and absolutely represent my preferred aesthetic for mechanical design, which is large sections of bold and simplistic shapes connected by the smaller intricate details ( which is why I also liked the sphere-type in the mood board better). 12, 8 for me looks the most alien-like, and has a lot of personality to it (seems like the most menacing and evil looking). 

However, Liam's favourites were 6 and 7, in which he love the idea of the gadgets popping out from the body of 6 and the shell-like bars around the the main body of 7. As a result, my next step is to come up with a design that incorporate these element in one body. Overall, a very good start