After our characters were made, we asked for more input from visual development artist Emily Mai who did this beautiful concept art.

Inspired by the Old City of Jerusalem. Here is work in progress by our very own Chrisy Baek. Everything started with research and planning. After gathering reference, Chrisy blocked out the set to accommodate the story as well as be true to the location. Here is her process:

Just like with the environment, my first step was research. I knew what I wanted the characters to look like in terms of their stylisation, but as I did not have solid concept art to work from, so I compiled references together, and then went straight to 3D to discover the characters and reflect their personalities through their individual designs.

As part of my iteration process, I like to draw over my work, in order to make it better.

When it came to the look development process, my goal was to create appealing and believable characters. My first hurdle was to figure out how to shade and texture skin. Here are some iterations I went through, while simultaneously changing the character model to fit the world I had envisioned:

 My next obstacle was hair. Having curly hair, I could use myself as reference, and I wanted to represent a culture that is often not represented on screen.

With Nour, I wnated to push the boundaries of what is considered appealing. 

As for the animation process, we filmed some actresses from NYU’s Tisch Program, Brooklyn Boukather (left) and Drew Lederman (right) for reference. This is extremely helpful and valuable to the animator’s authenticity and believability of the emtion we want to convey.

After Maya recruited an army of animators, it is time to get to production and do dailies, which involve reviewing the animation and giving notes to keep the overall appeal and keep the animation consistent. 

Here is some of my process for the crowd:

I started off with 4 rigs with a base body type ( Male and Female Stout and Thin). Then I sculpted 6 face variations per rig, which gives me at least 24 basic crowds to work with.

To further add diversity to the crowd, I made what I call an ID Control. As you can see in the video, this gives my team the control to personalize clothes and various accessories.

Not only do I feel like this will diversify the crowd, it will also help us art direct it rather than randomize it and risking having multiple same characters in one scene. I am also planning to vary up colour and patterns on the clothes and skin to further vary the crowd.

My Crowd Rig