Moodboards, Ideas and Sketches

After we were briefed, I threw these quick moodboards together to get a sense of direction we wanted our group to head in. We didn't want to go too over the top in terms of realism, so we decided to look at characters from games like Psychonauts, Rayman and Abe's Odysee. These characters have these strange and quirky ways about them that makes them really likeable. I also think it would be more interesting and challenging to design a character like this.

I began by breaking down words and ideas that revolve around the brief's themes: surveillance, stolen and exchange. I really liked my ideas that came from the theme exchange.
Rather than a physical exchange, I was thinking about an exchange between life and death. However I thought this broke away from the brief a bit too much and decided to change the idea around a bit. The concept revolving around life after was interesting so instead I thought about grave robber's and an exchange in a graveyard. The basic idea was that two character's dig up a grave to exchange an item or body. I immediately thought of Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns and of the game Red Dead Redemption.

After looking at Red Dead Redemption, I found the graveyards in Mexico to be a lot more visually interesting, so I thought why not set it in Mexico. We could draw inspiration from the day of the dead to create this really stylized, mysterious graveyard where only a few colours really stand out, like really luminscent green mist and white marble stone. This inspiration could also help with the plot, something like the item these two people are trying to find is a magical object.

 

I didn't want to create characters that look human so I tried to find animals that would suit the persona of a grave robber. I chose a magpie and as they are known for stealing valuables and a bird native to Mexico, the Crested Caracara. The smaller one with the hunched back is the magpie and the other is the Crested Caracara.