So to start with I want to talk through the Doctor & The Assistant:
The Doctor I wanted to be a shaggy kind of character, scruffy but still relatively good looking to accompany the assistant. The current Doctor Who however places so much emphasis on the Doctor and the assistant is just a boring sidekick. I wanted to make the Doctor and his assistant to be like a proper duo. The kind of team that are never separated and have some weird chemistry. So I set about designing characters faces mainly along side each other hoping something would stick.
The whole time during my designing I kept referring back to Peter De Seve who I aspired to throughout the early phases of the project for stylisation of my characters . I bought his amazing book " The Duchess of Whimsy", which he provided the illustrations for, as he collaborated with his wife who wrote the book. I would have loved to have also got my hands on "sketchbook", or " A Sketchy Past : The Art of Peter De Seve" but for now I'm just gathering some money to get hold of these gems.
Whilst I was designing the Assistant I constantly wanted a tubby little loud mouth, but I stuck for too long with the generically hot female character. However after studying some A list celebs and caricaturing them, I started to find some principles that worked across all, in my eyes, appealing female characters and started to try and put them into a fatter shape. I looked at character designer bloggs to get an idea for varying shapes and sizes and remembered how Curtis Jobbling ( BAF ) had said in his talk how great characters stemmed from the simplest forms and eventually stuck with a heart on top of a triangle for the assistant. The Doctor who I designed first, I was just pushing and pulling parts of his face to get a the rugged look I was going for whilst maintaining his smart and geeky yet somewhat "handsome" face. It was two different approaches but the assistant is by far my favourite. She has energy about her which I think I got across somewhat in the design sheets. Ultimately her inspiration I feel came from Edna from the incredibles, as she is a character both in look and personality that differs from that to the standard female character and this is why she is memorable. So much personality from such a small person!
The bodies of the characters were just clothes thrown around simple shapes (as Derek and Kathy rightly pointed out which I will definitely consider further in future character design) , the assistant sporting a modern designer coat that I found in a fashion magazine and the Doctor also dons a smart and sophisticated look that looks slightly dishevelled to show how he rarely looks after his appearance any more.
My sub characters were literally banged out, partly because I had already been through the process with the other two and also because I was decisive with their look as I had there personality's in mind from the start and didn't look to develop them to much. Shakespeare I thought would be a fun character to work on, all his paintings are so stern and he looks quite prude so I went for a more adventurous Shakespeare. Camp, has let himself go and has a few ghosts in the closet that no one knows about
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The other character I chose was the lute player, even though he had a small part to play I had an eloborate back story to him in my head, I had this fixation of Napoleon dynamite and used this as a base to go about creating a tudor stylized version with my own added features here and there. He needs a lot more work but the base is there. His body is also lacking a lot of structure.
All in all the characters as lines were my favourite part of the pre production , I loved bringing them alive and trying to capture the essence of their personality. My favourite characters were the Assistant and Shakespeare. From creating the characters I learnt how useful having style reference can be and any reference, it gives you a general aim and direction instead of fishing in the dark like you so often do. Having a solid back story and personality for the characters also makes it far easier to caricature them. Below is my final sheet I did for characters, I was trying to get across how the duet acted together. The Assistant is the larger personality, she also assistant gets bored easily, often ignorant to the Doctor.
