The little concepts by Emmanuel Borg: The Skillful Huntsman part 7

The concept for the King started with Le stating, ‘I love drawing headpieces. You can definitely go wild with the design since he’s a king, so the more elaborate the better. The four headpieces have their own sense of character. The first is noble; the second is mysterious, while the third and fourth are feminine and spiritual.’ [p.126] . The drawing here shows how little details influence a character’s appearance. ‘Ever since I read the Dune book about the evil baron, I thought it was very cool that he had a personal vehicle to move him about in his palace. I wanted the king in this story to have the same type of mobility. Maybe his legs are too weak for walking much in his large castle, or maybe he’s just lazy.’[P.128] Stated Le. This gives you an idea of a different perspective of how the king is like, he’s too lazy to do anything or to move around, and maybe he’s a bit of a slob. Yoon had a completely different idea for the King; he wanted him to be this really intimidating character an authoritative figure that stands out from the rest. ‘I wanted him to be a very uptight, solemn, and authoritative figure’ states Yoon. [P.130]

Designing the captain from the story was another difficult task , but Robertson states ‘Aggressive, mean-spirited characters are easier to draw and design because we can easily over exaggerate their personalities; they become stronger icons of evil full of danger, mystery, and excitement.’ This is not always the case. A character like Vlad from Far Cry 3 had a lot of difference characteristics. Yamada states ‘I saw the captain as an imposing figure, but incredibly weak at the same time. We know that his moral fortitude does not match his physical one.’ [p.140]In contrast Yamada gives his own perspective for the evil character; he wanted to give the illusion of the character being strong, because of all the burden of his amrour, but weak because underneath that armour he’s really just a slender figure. Yoon ‘I kept in mind that the captain would be a wicked, greedy character.’ [P 141] Yoon expresses this in his sketches in page 141, one could see the wide smile in some of his characters and the character looks incredibly witty. He also gave the Captain a religious look to his robes. This was to contrast the captain as he is an indication of evil. Yoon states ‘This image of good contrasts well with his evil motives.’ This is a tactic used by plenty of game companies; one could clearly be seen in Final Fantasy or Devil May Cry. Robertson adds a very interesting point following his students work. ‘Generally speaking, people view round shapes as friendly and angular shapes as mean or aggressive.’[P.142] Sharp heads are generally are seen as more dangerous and less friendly characters. In comparison round are more seen as genuine friendly characters, take Super Mario for example, and compare this with a character Waluigi. Normally a person won’t touch something that is pointy, or has a sharp edge, because this kind of reminds the person of a knife, while a round thing brings back memories like a ball. A clear experimentation of different media, armour designs, it all goes throughout an artist’s mind when creating these characters.