Rodrigo Sousa
patreon
Spider creature design
🕑 Added 2023-09-06 12:48:52 +0000 UTCHere is a thought process behind another of the creatures from the "Playground - trailer"
The fist idea I had was for a scene, where children trying to escape a spider like creature on a spider web/ playground climbing net. I wanted to bring horror to a usually happy and palyfull place, that's was one of the core ideas of all of the project, mixing horror and colorful kid games.
Then for the creature I thaught of a spider like creature that whould chase the kids onthe surface of the climbing tower. The spider creature would be quite massive compared to the kids, so I asked myself how could it reach the kids if they hide into the climbing net structure. That's when I thaught of the spiders that carry all of their babies on their abdomen, and maybe this spider babies would detach and chase the kids.
I then tried mixing the idea of little spiders coming from their mom's abdomen and a shape box toy I had when I was kid. This idea of mixing things in an unexpected way is sometimes how our brain works when we have nightmares and imagine some bizarre imagery. This mixing idea was used for most of my creatures ideas, tying to come up with original and scary ideas by mixing together two completely different things ( like a toy and a scary spider).
Here is the toy shape box, each little spider would pop out of the big spider body. Each would have a different shape.
Here is the fisrt super roughs of the spider creature, this are quite awful because I never expected anyone to see them, it was mainly finding a general shape for the creature. At first, as you can see the belly/ toy box part where the small spiders pop out from was on the front side, like a big head.
But I thaught it wasn't very scary so I decided to test other overall shapes, and ended up making it more humanoid with the toy box/ shape being it's belly, like a pregnant creature.
You can see here how the idea started very rough and got refined until arriving at an overall design that I liked. The shapes had eyes at first, this idea changed in the final design.
Once the design was finished, I had to make it work on the different shot in wich it would appear. Here are some rough framing ideas for the sequence.
The final drawing with the little star close to it, is very close to the final design from the trailer.
Here I had my overall shots for the sequence so I started layouting it on photoshop. I like to make little drawings and researchs on sketchbooks, and switch to computer and digital drawing only when I need to do the layout.
Then I added color to make some still frames. To see how the general mood of the sequence would look like.
And here is the final sequence! I wanted here to mainly show the design and idea evolution at each step. I will do more in depth animation step by steps in the future!
Hope you liked this post! Let me know what do you want to see more, and if you like this kind of post.
Thank you again for your support!
Comments
Crushin MyDinner
These BTS peeks into your creative process are fascinating. It's clear you have a special talent, and I see so much potential in these ideas. I really hope you get to turn these scenes you've created into a fully fleshed-out narrative project. Best of luck Rodrigo, I pray your hard work pays off in a great opportunity down the line!
Juan Carlos Martinez Bell-Lloch
Wow! that sounds like a lot of work and fun!! Thank you for sharing! π€©
Rodrigo Sousa
Thank you Juan! I developped all the shots at the same time, I did all rough designs, then all layouts, then animation/ background etc.. Also added some last shots at the last minute the ones that aren't very animated. I know that rough designs ideas and shot framing were done in my sketchbooks during free time after work and on weekends and vacations during maybe a month. Then I worked full time on the animatic, rough animation and layout/ stillframes during 3 months. It's difficult to say exactly but thats the overall time it took me before starting cleaning and coloring animation.
Rodrigo Sousa
You welcome! Happy you enjoyed it!
Rodrigo Sousa
Ahah yes happy you noticed!
Rodrigo Sousa
Oh thank you! :)
Esther Morales
This is SO cool and inspiring Rodrigo! Thanks for sharing your process with us! :D
Juan Carlos Martinez Bell-Lloch
This is amazing!! While you develop this (from the spider/toy/creature till the still frames) were you working on other parts of the project or you mainly focused on this? If thatβs the case, would you be able to remember approximately how long did this process take you to reach the still frames?
Marianne
the two legs dragging behing make it even more terrifying
dan challas
You creative son of a gun
