I created these character designs and animations for Eli Lilly & Company's booth at a Barcelona tradeshow. They were part of a trivia video game that ran in a kiosk.
The monster was fun to animate because I hadn't worked with that type of character before.
The game had three characters: The player's avatar, a disease-monster and a doctor. To add diversity to the player character, I generated designs for both male and female avatars. In the final version of the game the avatar's gender and skin tone were determined randomly at the start of each round.
The sketches also included a gender-neutral character.
The original project brief called for a male and female version of the doctor character. Multiple concepts were developed for each gender, but budget constraints eventually forced the client to choose only one design.
I really like these doctor designs. I wish we could ahve used all of them.
There was little direction given for the disease-monster. I provided sketches for an impersonal amoeba, an anthropomorphized virus, and a blob with a face. The client chose the blob.
I prefer the anthropomorphized monster.
Once the client approved the designs, I turned the sketches over to my partner. She developed color, vector artwork in Adobe Illustrator. I later imported the vector art into Adobe Flash for animation.
Color character with selected stills from the animations.
The final version of each character hewed very close to the pencil sketches.
The final monster design lost the "teeth” while the doctor’s test tube was replaced by a pill.
I completed all animation work in Adobe Flash before turning it over to the programmer. In this case, the game was also built in Flash, but I could have exported an image sequence for use on another platform just as easily.
The final product left the client happy and kept within their budget.
