Background designs

 These are the 1st and 2nd draft designs for the backgrounds.

With this one I was testing a panel from the then 2nd draft Storyboard as the men approach before they get crapped on.

Background Design: Larry's House

The film starts with Larry exiting his house, which is a birdhouse on top of a telephone pole.

I decided to put it on top of a phone pole because it was the simplest way fro Larry to get onto the wire to meet Joe....... also I thought it was a fun ideaThis is the final version of Larry's house.
I kept the design very simple, but stylistically similar to the character design.

Human Character design

Here are a few designs for the human characters that Larry and Joe crap on.
I wanted to make a really simple design with no facial features besides the nose and ears, that way the rigging would only need to be for the body.
I will also use the same rig for all 3 men who get crapped on, but alter their sizes and colour of clothing.

This one above is pretty much the final design I'm going with.

Joe Pidgeon Character Designs

Here are some designs I did for joe

Larry Design: Test Sculptures

While I was designing Larry on paper I was trying out different designs with plasticine to find out what he would look like in 3 dimensions.
With these three above I was seeing what it would be like to have the character pretty much flat/one sided. I think it would look really interesting to animate in 3d.
But since I haven't done any facial rigging rigged before I wasn't sure exactly sure how I'd pull it off, so I moved on to a full 3 dimensional design, though this style is definitely something I will look into for future projects.

Larry Boyd Character Designs

These are some of the early character designs for Larry Boyd, where I was trying to find the right look to match his personality.
This design above was the original character that the story for the film was based on.
His name was Chuck Wood and his design was much more Loony Tunes inspired than the designs that follow.

I kept trying to simplify the design to find the style, and since Larry is the main character his design would dictate the style of the other characters and the world they occupy.

Visual Influences

Here are some images that I used as reference to help create the look of the characters and environment for Larry Boyd.

Influences

When I began developing the concept for Larry Boyd I was watching a lot of Mad Men,, and was really influenced by this period in the early 1960's.

Somehow along the way Larry Boyd became set in the 60's......
but now I couldn't imagine it any other way.

Another huge Influence was the Classic gag cartoons from the 1930's and 40's by Warner Bros and MGM by directors such as Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones.
Larry Boyd is sort of my own take on this style of gag cartoon.

The original character designs for Larry Boyd were much more Loony Tunes inspired, though soon became more stylized to fit into the 60's setting. The biggest influence for the character design was Ed Benedict, the creator of the Hannah-Barberra style of the 1960's for characters such as The Flintstones and Yogi.