As a practical part of my master thesis I did and documented a Character Design for Chris Creatures Filmeffects. The whole project took about six month with some breaks during my research and writing stage of the thesis. It was also a cooperation project with the 3D artist Alexander Holz who supported the design process with his three dimensional modelings of the creature.

The project started with an interview with Chris Kunzmann about his thoughts and wishes on the task. It came out that the creature should represent the company and its two main areas of work, the digital part and the practical one, as some kind of mascot. It could later be used in press releases or in a showreel.

From the beginning on I kept a sketchbook to collect every scribble related to the project.

The next step was to create some silhouette-thumbnails for the first fast impressions of the creature in general. The actual kind of creature was left open so I’ve tried out a whole bunch of ideas. The figure should combine some sort of wild animal with cyborg parts. As I’m not quite familiar with cyborg artwork I did a lot of research but still it felt quite hard.

I also did some more detailed sketches to give a first impression on how to use details like the green color and the logo of the company inside the design.

After some feedback from Chris I’ve sketched some more detailed variations and combinations of the thumbnails and sketches he liked so far, playing around with different shapes and weapons.

For the sketch number 12 I took a little more time and in the end this sketch was favoured for a first three dimensional modeling to test out the design done by Alexander Holz.

At this point it was quite half time of the design process. The three dimensional model showed that the creature was not quite the one Chris wanted and so my next step was to restart the research and design process with some new thoughts and influences to come to some new design solutions.  😮