The hero of “Prince Harming to Prince Charming” animation is a turkey is ugly and likable at the same time. We thought he would be the most challenging character for Luis, but as you will see, Luis got it right the very first time.
First draft of the "Turkey" Character
During (Internet Relay Chat) the chat with on our animux chatroom regarding the character design for the Turkey with Luis, Daniel, me (Mark) we discussed to some detail about the various aspects of the character. (The chatlogs will be made available soon on the website.) Like we had mentioned in the previous article, we were going to use cliche’s with these characters. So our plan is to have a few obvious features out of symmetry with the turkey while making sure these did make him disabled. This was key because we did not want to offend anyone as well as it was never in the concept of the story. We knew that the peacock would push us to the limit with our technology, the turkey would push us to our limit with character development and design.
Body
Even though the turkeys in real life are bigger than the peacocks, for this short we decided to make turkey look smaller than the peacock, to make sure the peacock’s “machoness” would not suffer. We did not want any of the characters to wear clothes (only accessories) as we thought hiding the peacock’s beautiful feathers would an attrocity, and we could not have a peacock in cloth, we could not have the turkey in cloth too. The turkey would be shorter in length from beak to tail and also in height. The hands were something, we wished we worked more on, but for now, we are going with the 4 digit hand, which looks something like the baseball gloove. Tail is going to be similar to the real turkey.
Face
We wanted the turkey’s face to project the following characteristics (i)Ugly but innocent, (ii) eagerness but also helplessness (iii)Simple but not stupid. He should have face that shows a lost kid in the mall that strangers go out of their way too help. Unless we can do that, the audience will not empathize with him. So, he is going to have big eyes.
Final draft of the turkey
This is all the information we gave Luis and he came up with the above image. (We loved it, we hope and pray you will love it too.)
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