This week we are finally diving deeper into character and environment design. I started blocking out Critter's chilly home, the Ice Belt, closely following the earlier concepts by Beau and Vivien.

This week I went over some of Andy's previs work and pushed it a bit further to clarify the story/acting choices and lay the groundwork for the layout process, which will happen once we have final characters, props and sets. Overall it was mostly about tweaking the composition and staging, to help readability and flow of the edit from one shot to another. Then on the character side, adding beats to induce urgency/panic, surprise, thought process and determination. The less glamorous work also needed to be done under the hood, like making sure all the constraints were set up properly between the character, camera and floating rocks that the character interacts with.

I've been working on this film for a couple of months, creating various iterations of the animatic, concept doodles and crappy models. I'm super excited to have everyone else on the team now to work on the design and first assets. This is a small selection of my stuff, beware of spoilers!

Together with Andy and Vivien, I experimented with different crystal and ice formations. Also considering shading to achieve certain effects like the light scattering in ice. These images informed certain decisions that hopefully bring even better looking results.

Some of the stuff I did so far on the project, not just this week! Mostly I worked on Critter and some early concept art. Hopefully next week I can just on board fully and continue the exploration for the main elements of the film!