30. CELEBRITY AUDITIONS

At this point of the production, I felt (tentatively) finished with the sets. But now came the most intimidating element of production: characters.

I have never felt comfortable making characters for the different projects I've produced, but following The Elf Who Killed Christmas, I developed a bit more confidence. For that project, we worked with a character designer who drew the images that I rotoscoped from. These were cartoon-style characters, and working from them, I saw that it wasn't as difficult as I had feared. I was very happy with how the final characters turned out for that video game.

Since facing success with that project, I challenged myself on "TheMusic Erich Zann" to not only model interesting characters, but also design them myself. However, I didn't really know what style I was going for with the characters. This is where I did a ton of online research. Unlike The Elf Who Killed Christmas, I knew that I wouldn't be able to count on someone to give me the exact illustrations that I needed to rotoscope faces and bodies. I knew that I wanted some sort of caricatured style, but not being an illustrator, or drawer, I really wasn't sure how I would accomplish this since I knew that I wouldn't find a perfect side and front view of any caricatured person.

However, after seeing some great caricatures online, it gave me some ideas about which celebrities I would try to copy. I figured that if I picked famous enough celebrities, it would be easier to find a front and side view to copy. So I searched out some images of character actors whose faces I really admired.

I knew that I wasn't good enough to copy faces in a realistic manner, so I didn't need to be worried about any of my characters resembling real-life people. In fact, looking at the characters now, nobody would ever mistake my characters for those people.



  

   

The actors I modeled my characters after are Timothy Spall and Natalie Portman. Those final decisions were pretty much based on the fact that they were the only actors I found appropriate reference images, from the other actors I wanted to model. Amongst the other actors that I wanted in "The Music of Erich Zann" were Danny DeVito, Takashi Shimura, and Peter Lorre; for the student, I also considered Helena Bonham Carter. Thinking about it now, I guess it's fun to think of myself as having these great actors to choose from; but there's only room to cast one for each role. There were many great auditions to choose from, I'm sorry to those who weren't selected. I wish you all better luck next time.

      

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