Designing a character for a horror film

It’s no secret that a lot of creative projects aren’t seen by the public eye for a long time even after they’ve been wrapped up. Luckily these types of projects are few and far between for me and I can usually share work quite quickly, but in the instances that I can’t, it’s usually well worth the wait.

I’ve been wanting to share this project since I finished working on it around a year ago now, it’s always been a dream project of mine to design a character for a film and I feel extremely lucky to be given the opportunity to do that for this project. I was going to do this through one blog post, but after writing the whole thing out and considering the amount of images I need to include, I thought it would work much better as two separate blog posts.

‘Paying homage to 1980s creature features, SHREDDERS is a blend of action, horror and hilarious comedy dripping in neon and synth.’ - poshdinosaur.com/shredders

When I received the script and ideas from the guys over at Posh Dinosaur Productions I was extremely excited to get started and I felt like it was the perfect fit for us to be working together. Seeing as it was the first time I’d ever worked on a film I thought it might be interesting to share the process on my end from start to finish and finally share the final illustrations that I created!

Inspiration and initial sketches

The team over at a Posh Dinosaur Productions mentioned a couple of films to me that had inspired Shredders, they were films I’d seen as a child so I did have a memory of them, which was important to me because I felt like I remembered enough to use these films as inspiration without looking back at them. I didn’t want to watch them again or do any research into the creatures in those films because I didn’t want to be ‘too’ inspired by them, I wanted to use my memory of those films to interpret some new ideas so that I could come up with something unique.

There were a few suggestions about how the Shredders should look, but I had a lot of creative control so I started out by creating various silhouettes for the Shredders overall body shape and doing some teeth and mouth explorations because they were going to be a big part of the Shredders design and there were a lot of ways we could go with them. Some of the inspirations I used for the teeth were Mako sharks, Daubenton bats and Piranhas.

Character Development

Once we have decided on a direction to go with the design of the Shredders, it was time to start developing that initial idea more into a more detailed character. This part is always really fun and is when you get the chance to provide the client with plenty of ideas to choose from. I find it’s best to sketch up plenty of characters with different shapes, features and details. Once I’ve done this I usually duplicate the characters 3-4 times (sometimes more) and change small elements on each one, so for example sometimes I might make the eyes smaller and further apart on one and then on the next one I might keep those smaller eyes and then also move the arms up slightly.

Sometimes you might think you’ve translated an idea well when you draw it, but making subtle changes like this can actually make a really big difference and make a character work much better visually than you first thought. It’s also really handy if you want to create a species of a character which is what we ended up doing after the team really liked three of the ideas rather than just one! We also decided to give the Shredders some texture to their skin along with patches of hair which helped them to look more wild and creepy. I ended up using elephant skin as an inspiration for the Shredders stomach and reptile skin as inspiration for the rest of the Shredders body.

Using various inspirations and merging them together to create an original character was one of my favourite parts of the project and why I love creature design so much. Above are the final design ideas for 3 of the Shredders which were used in the final artwork. Next week I’ll go over how I then turn these ideas into a fully fleshed out character sheet and I’ll also share the final promotional artwork.