Human Characters
During the writing process there was talk of what characters would show up and why.
At one point we thought about five characters. The librarian who would for whatever reason be misplacing Bobby every time he falls, the person who would find Bobby and finally read him and finally three characters who would be customers of the book store. Then we started to flesh out the characters.
I will talk about the librarian and the little girl in their own sections below the first image of all the characters together.
The first thing that had to be decided was which sections were going to have a human character. We arrived at Music, Western and Magazine.
The music section was going to have a cool looking woman dressed in cyber punk goth clothing and permanently listening to headphones, reflecting the style of the section. Sadly both her and the section she was part of were scrapped in the later stages of the project.
The western section has an older man obsessed with the old wild west who made it his entire personality. He stayed and is in the final animation if a bit toned down.
The magazine section had a girl that looked a lot like Barbie and she sadly met the same fate as the Music Girl.
Progress of the Librarian
The librarian was the first character we needed to make. She was a big part of the reason this whole story was happening; it was her misplacing of Bobby that started the whole thing. There had to be a reason, I made three.
The three librarians
There were many reasons the librarian could myspace the book but the two I came up with were either she was too old to place it properly or too apathetic to care about its placement. The too old was what we went with in the end but I will mention the two other ideas first. The middle aged librarian who worked there for most of her life and was just counting down the days until she could retire and spoil her grandkids didn't care much because of her one track mind to retirement, she has also worked there long enough to know she wouldn't get fired for something like that. The young librarian was working there to make money while she studied and really didn't care much for the library, this was simply a job and she wanted to make it as easy as possible for herself.
After the drafts of the different librarians the group has decided to use the oldest version, the one too old to work. And the decision was made to move the young ones' designs to the music section as the music girl.
I then continued by fleshing out the old design.
The colours were the next thing that needed to be decided so I made plenty of colour variations to choose from.
The colours that were decided on were the middle skin tone, pink dress and grey cardigan. The flower pattern that was later lost was inspired by the clothes my grandmother wears.
And finally the ůast change between the final design and the clean up design was the glasses she wears. They were originally sharp, but as per recommendation of one of our teachers I changed the design to be more rounded. Giving her a softer feeling than she had before.
Progress of the Little Girl
The little girl was much more straightforward and made with even more input from the other members of team four. She is also probably the most important character aside from Bobby himself.
The idea at first was just a little girl but we had to make her look adventurous and not generic.
The idea came that made her and the librarian were related but that was later scrapped. Because of their initial relationship she had a lot of her colour pallet shared with the librarian. The colours were too dull for a little kid so I brightened them and made them more vibrant. Then we started thinking of the changes in her design, shifting her pigtails into braids and her rain boots into sneakers and adding a patch on her knee. The next attempt was to curl her hair and make the overalls into pants which didn't feel right so they were then changed back into now oversized overalls. But something didn't feel right until the pink parts of the design became yellow. Which is when we arrived at our final design.
Sadly the only part of the design that was translated to the final short movie was her hair as the model was very hard to edit.