The design for the riverbank scene was split into two parts, character and environment design.

This was a process of creative visualization, since the only ideas we had about the “look” of the characters and setting came from short sentences in the stage play. We had to design a world that held together and was visually interesting enough to draw viewers into its virtual reality.

Carlos Amato headed the character design, while Lauren Brom headed the environmental design. Our first step was to call on the services of veteran designer, Allan Cameron (notes from Allan’s seminar are posted on the production website). Allan set us on the path of covering our walls with design references of all shapes and forms. We slowly began generating a picture of how our world was going to look. We also looked at the animal world for archetypal representations of the natures of our lead characters. We thought it would be interesting to assimilate very faint representations of animals into our character designs.

Carlos created designs for the five lead characters in the story, although we only ended up creating three of them for the purposes of the riverbank scene. We'll have a look at them first.