Friday, November 20, 2015

The President

The Monkey Island in Marco Macaco is ruled by a ruthless dictator, the President, whose security interests are Marco's most passionate concern. Whereas Lulu's model is basically a modification of Marco's, the President has a completely new type of monkey face, which is in turn reused for a number of other characters, such as pirate monkies and some incidental characters.

Early sketches of the President by Jan Rahbek, 2009.

President suggestions by Teddy Kristiansen and Kim Hagen, 2009.

As with Lulu, preliminary sketches had been done by Jan Rahbek, Kim Hagen and Teddy Kristiansen. As you can see, my final design didn't deviate much from the early ideas. I exaggerated the shoulders to make his body shape more triangular, and after a few attempts settled on the funny long muzzle. I kind of like the graphical quality of the mouth, something that is not often seen in CGI animation.


Final inspirational models for the President by Dan Harder, 2010.

Since the President's design, both head and body, was very different from Marco's, the modeler, Jimmy Levinsky, had to build an (almost) completely new character this time. The ears, eyes and eyebrows could be reused, but the lower part of the head was entirely new. Here are my "technical" sketches for his Excellency.



Trying to make the most of our limited resources, even individual body parts were reused between the characters. Thus, the nose that was introduced on the President may be recognized on the film's second villain, Carlo, plus on a host of other characters in the movie.

The sleeves on the President's uniform were borrowed from the villain of the Disco Worms, Tony Dean's jacket - the folds and wrinkles on which I actually modeled myself one late night back then. No reason to build the same sleeve twice!

By adding a seam on the edges of Marco's hands, they were quickly converted into the President's white gloves. Of course, none of the rigging was preserved this way, but it was still faster than building gloves from scratch and having to go through the design phase once more.

Marco's hands converted into the Presidents gloves.

Details of army paraphernalia.

Reusing the upper part of the head (ears and eye surroundings) from Marco, expression sketches only had to be done for the President's mouth shapes.








Here is a screen dump from Maya of the President, along with some movie stills.








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