Written Treatment

Written treatment

For this assignment, I have created a character that portrays an evil presence, one in which would be a villain in a film or TV series. Huge, muscular, powerful and evil would be words best to describe my figure. My characters name is ‘Gruk’, a typical short ogre/beast type of name, relating to the look of the character. He is a giant, cross between human and a beast, a mutant, born with a deformity and ridiculous strength. His roots are pure evil and he is one of the most dangerous creatures in the world. Locked inside a high security prison in Brazil, the world is safe from this human eating monstrosity. However, as my storyboard shows, the chains around him are far too weak and he is able to break them and set free into the world, creating havoc and destroying the world alone. He is 17ft tall, three times bigger than the average human, and weighs around 80 stone. His habitat before being caught was a cave in the Amazon rainforest, where he had been dumped as a child, therefore growing up feral and fending for himself, eating any meat he could get his hands on, ranging from rats to tigers. However, he drifted further and further towards civilisation and begun hunting tribes of locals to the jungle before being hunted down by specialists that had heard of the beast due to television shows into the mysteries of the beast.

One of the main features of my character is his razor sharp teeth and large jaw, able to rip apart any living thing. He wears a convict style costume and has chains around his neck, and both his wrists which he has broken off to continue on from my storyboard idea. He has long dry smelly hair but no facial hair due to the lack of growth in this area of the face. Another main feature shows his very long large muscular arms that hang down as low as his knees, with his strength, he can break almost anything. He isn’t very agile due to his mass and small legs, but uses his arms as aid to knock things out of the way during his chases, like trees and cars for example. Before eating his catch, he teases with his prey, launching them up in the air, as he says it helps tenderise the meat on the landing. He starts from the legs up which is a weird way to start because normally giants start with the head first, but not Gruk.
His age is unidentified and there is no way of showing because no tests have been done on him yet with his immunity to tranquilisers and other forms of drug. He has an utterly foul breath, like the smell of rotting flesh mixed with decayed plant life (as he used plants as a side dish with his meaty meals). His main traits are anger and hunger, which drive him onto being the successful predator he is. His eyes are piercingly red and stares any opponent out with his terrifying look.

 From the start of this assignment, I knew I wanted to create a monster type character where I could push the boundaries and design my own build of a figure, exaggerating limbs and features. Initially, I started off my design process by drawing faces for my character, designing scary looking beings in order to get inspiration and help develop a sense of direction. I began a route leading into the zombie world, where I planned on creating Zombie Leader, but a strong muscular one instead of the generic skinny ones you always see, I wanted to create something different. I really like the face i created for my zombie character because it looked scary and very much like a king zombie, although, it didn’t seem to work well with the body style of a muscular figure. I altered the figure slighty and then went down the route of developing my char5acter into a fighting one with arm pads and a belt, getting inspiration from the ‘Mortal Kombat’ franchise: http://mortalkombat.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Krypt_Concept_Art_Character

I then started looking at concept art I found really interesting in a game I played called ‘Batman Arkham Asylum’. I wanted to try and mix my idea of a character between a Mortal Kombat figure and a Batman style villain. This game had a big influence on the design of my final character because of the really detailed and amazing looking art they created for the concepts of the game: http://www.neoseeker.com/Games/Products/ps3/batman_arkham_asylum/concept_art.html
I really liked the big muscular characters and this influenced my desicion to stay on the route of creating a big built character.

As my storyboard shows, I have begun to tell the story of the character during its breakout of the Prison it is locked away in. As he is tied up, his chains are too weak, so he then breaks the chain of one arm and has free use of his arm to yank the chains from his neck and other arm. I would continue this storyboard on by making him smash through the prison bars as they also are weak before them grabbing a prison guard and unlocking the main vault doors of the prison. This would then lead him out into the real world where he would be on the run, hiding in forests close to civilisation.

I have really enjoyed this project because I love drawing and I absolutely love designing my own characters without limitations. I also really like my character because I think it shows a realistic look of what a giant evil beast monster could look like. I also think I have managed to get all the proportions right and create a detailed and interesting looking figure, also showing muscle and skeleton configuration. I think the arms work really well on my character because I wanted to make my figure different, so I gave him long arms and fairly small legs.
I could have improved on my character my adding even more detail to the costume of the figure. I could have added a tracking device to his body, to show that he is real threat so that if he broke free, he would be easier to find. I could have done this by creating an ankle bracelet or even going underneath the skin to show a permanent attachment.

To create my character, I firstly drew him in pencil before then tracing over it on a new piece of paper with a fine liner pen. I then scanned my drawings into the computer and used Photoshop to render in my images.

For reference for drawing the muscle configuration, I used this website:  http://www.posemaniacs.com/archives/1277

For reference for drawing the skeleton, I used this website: http://www.janwebb.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/skeleton.jpg

Final Character Pose Clothed

Here are the finished photoshopped final versions of my clothed character shwoing three different angles, front, back and side views. I wanted to make the characters outfit orange at first, but then i thought that this was the typical convict clothes colour, so I changed it to blue. You can see the chains on his arms and head that link to my storyboard. I have done slight details in the clothes such as the sewn up trouser parts to show the wear and tear of the costume.

Final Pose Skeleton Configuration

here are two drawings of my skeleton for my character 'Gruk', where I have used pencil and produced two pages, one showing the original pencil drawing and another showing the bone names where I used photoshop text.

Final Pose Muscle Configuration

Here is my Muscle configuration drawing, where I have used pencil and drawn out the muscle for my character 'Gruk'.

Storyboard

Here is my storyboard showing the current stage of 'Gruks' life where he is imprisoned in a cell. However, he brakes the chains and becomes free.

Influences

here are some concepts that have influenced me. The top the are from the Batman Arkham asylum game, and the bottom image is from the game Mortal Kombat.

Character Design

here are some sketches of my character design process where you can see I have experimented just drawing the heads, fingers, teeth, eyes, noes and body shapes. I haven't gone into too much detail but I wanted to just experiment with all different aspects of the build and body parts of my character to hopefully map out the route I want to go down in my character design.