This is the clown carny, one of many formidable foes that Two-Headed Cop goes toe-to-toe with:
2hc discovers a whole troupe of carnies, including this clown, attempting to pilfer a few boxloads of top hats from the central haberdasher. As you may have guessed, it’s all action from that point forward.
The vid above was created to test out the look we’re going for, which is more simplified and graphic than most of the current approaches to rendering in computer animation. We want it to have some of the look and feel of vintage animation, complete with film grain and scratches and color bleeds. Sort of like how these old Superman and Looney Toons cartoons looked:
But then mixed with the dramatic look of film noir:
Like I’ve said previously, I think it’s a mix of styles that marries well together.
Combine cartoons and film noir, and you’ll have a veritable powder keg just waiting to explode! Ka-BLOOEY!
Also, here’s Anna’s design for the clown, with a little dramatic coloring thrown on by me:
At the beginning of our story, Two-Headed Cop gets tangled up with a group C-Ray describes as “a pack of hopped up clowns!” He’s referring to a large herd of carnies who they discover pilfering top hats from a haberdasher. The small pic above is a small section I grabbed of a larger illustration from our original pitch bible. (Once again, 2HC is way off-model there, but I still like the scene itself.)
There are some featured carnies during this sequence, like the Clown I showed earlier, but there are also a bunch of what we call “generic” carnies that 2HC fights, roughly ten or twenty of them. Because of this, I needed our intrepid designer, Anna, to dig in and knock out a bunch of crazy looking miscreants. Guys like this:
By the way, if you google the word “moron”, this is the first image that comes up, top left corner. Awesome.
I pushed for Anna to make them distinctly odd, with lots of asymmetry and weird proportions. Here are some of the results:
Can’t wait to see these guys trying to beat the stuffing out of 2HC!
No circus sideshow or carnival is complete without one! The Strongman is one of many carnies who do battle with Two-Headed Cop at the beginning of our film, and probably the most physically imposing (he is literally referred to as “the strong man”, so I guess that goes without saying.)
When considering the look for the Strongman, I kept thinking back not to old fashioned carnival sideshows, but to the movie “Escape From New York” by John Carpenter, which made quite an impression on me as a young teen. There’s one scene where Kurt Russel has a crazy mano-a-mano fight in a ring with a giant scary man with super-awesome facial hair. There was even a clip of them circling each other in the trailer for the movie at the time, and I remember wondering how the main character got to the point where his best option was to fight that guy!
In real life that guy’s name is Ox Baker, and he used to be a professional wrestler. Here he is with some other reference I sent to our designer:
That t-shirt is one of the greatest ever, by the way.
Anna did some awesome explorations for this character, especially in regard to the facial hair. It’s a great problem to have when there are too many cool designs to choose from:
Lastly, here’s what he looks like fleshed out in 3d (minus the textures and color) with the model created by AnimationRigs.com:
His body hair is going to be interesting, from a technical point of view (and, sure, from an aesthetic one as well.) Right now it’s geometry, but we may switch to utilizing hair simulation. Whichever works best.
Regardless, at one point this guy tries to drop a grand piano on 2HC’s head(s), so that’s something we can all look forward to.