Cheyenne: Evolution of a Character Design

About three years ago (yeesh, has it been that long?), my then-boss pulled me and several other staff artists into a room and plopped a My Little Pony in front of us. He told us that we were going to bid on a project about a pop-star Candyland princess, and that we needed to create designs based around the girliest, most disgustingly hot pink toys we could imagine. Sounded like fun, so we were off and running.

My first round of designs looked like this:

"Too much princess, not enough pop star," came the response. They told me to back off on the candy theme (no pink hair, alas) and push the stylized look. My next round came out looking like this:

"Lose the crown altogether, and make her edgier." Edgy is probably the single most annoying word that any designer can hear, because it means completely different things to different people. For some, edgy is just about more black and sharp corners; for others, it's just showing them something they've never seen before. In any case, it's a completely unhelpful term that should be banished from all discussion of art forever (yes, I do feel that strongly about it), so I just randomly picked a new approach to my next set of designs: 80s Barbie + Chris Sanders face =

They liked that: "More Chris Sanders!" This time, however, they wanted more of an early Britney Spears, that sort of unwitting sexpot, so I turned the outfit pink and the undies white, gave her some tousled hair and voila:

Now they were really loving the character, but the style was still too classic Disney (I can't help it!), so they encouraged me to really push the design as far as I could while maintaining the cute/sexy attitude. Since pigtails say "cute" to me and big boobs and a big round butt says "sexy," I combined those elements, used the Coppertone girl as inspiration for the pose, and turned out this:

This ended the design phase, so we then hastily put together an animation test and presented it for consideration. We won the bid, and went into production on Cheyenne Cinnamon and the Fantabulous Unicorn of Sugar Town Candy Fudge for Adult Swim. The final design was not created by me, but was a collaboration by my talented friends Todd Redner and Eric Cerda:

I'd like to think that I influenced the design in some way, but regardless, participating in the design process was a nifty experience, and helped tremendously when I later helped design for other show pitches. If those shows ever make it to air *crosses fingers* I'll make sure to post the prelim work again!

Related Reading: Creating Characters With Personality, by Tom Bancroft

Waking Sleeping Beauty (with special guests....)

This week, I attended a SCAD-Atlanta screening of the documentary "Waking Sleeping Beauty," presented by none other than Peter Schneider, co-director of the film and erstwhile President of Disney Animation. Ah, the perks of being an alumnus!

The movie was excellent, created as it was entirely using old clips (grain and all) from the period in question: 1984-1994 at Disney Feature Animation. No talking heads, as Peter said. This approach gave the film a unique honesty, even showing some heroes of the animation world in a less-than-heroic light, and setting it in stark contrast to the highly sanitized DVD features to which we've all become accustomed. There were appearances by all my favorite artists (I screamed..... er, cheered particularly loudly for a former professor of ours, Phil Young, when he popped up on screen for about two seconds), and plenty of never-before-seen footage that left my little animator's heart all a-twitter. Or twitterpated, as the case may have been. Overall, I found the film highly entertaining and educational, and will be pre-ordering the DVD as soon as it becomes available.

Just before the show, Peter had introduced a special guest.... Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel from The Little Mermaid! Now, I knew she lived in the Atlanta area, but her attendance at the presentation was a total surprise, so when she was announced, my friend Jo and I LEAPT to our feet and clapped and squealed like the fangirls we are. After the movie, she answered some questions along with Peter, until someone got the cojones to ask her what all of us were hoping: "Will you sing for us?"

***EDIT: So YouTube sucks, because they took the video down.  Come on, you can't even post a home video of the voice of Ariel singing her own song in a casual setting? Really? LAME.  Anyway, just go pop in your copy of The Little Mermaid and close your eyes, and you can imagine the awesomeness of the video that used to reside here.***

Bliss. My husband took this video, so that's me bobbing in and out of frame at left like a hyperactive squirrel.

Anyway, the whole experience was an absolute pleasure, and I highly recommend the movie even if you're not animation-obsessed. As a time capsule of a huge part of many of our childhoods, it's fascinating.

Related viewing: Dream On Silly Dreamer