Character Design

(taken from a report by head designer, Carlos Amato.
You can read his full report on the production website)

Designing the Feedback characters was a process of visualisation, but also one of adaptation. To some extent, we were simply absorbing five vivid stage characters and describing the physical properties that the play and the performances clearly implied.

But it was also necessary to generate character details that were not provided by the play; our screenwriting process expanded on the Detective once we settled on him as the lead character, and defined more of a contrast between Myrth and Byrth, who were only lightly distinguished in the play.

Once our storyline and character profiles had been established by the screenplay team, I began to sketch the characters and bring the drawings to our weekly evening sessions. We collectively decided on the drawings or elements of drawings that stood out as promising, and I developed these in the week that followed, incorporating ideas for facial and body features, clothing, and hairstyles.

Myrth, Byrth and the Detective each underwent a fair amount of revision. The brothers were a tricky task; to design young characters with strong presence is difficult for me. But I think we arrived at a drawn design for each brother that would gain richness and appeal in modelled and animated form. There is a strange, quiet, organic evolution that pushes a character when you put enough work into it; after a while you begin to feel that you know the characters as people, and not as ideas.

D’Earth was much easier to draw, and I am fairly confident that we won’t make many changes to him. He has life on paper, and I’m itching to model and animate him. Grave is still in the pipeline; we need to somehow reconcile the hulking brutish bouncer that we established early in the year with the hilariously bizarre personality that Lionel Newton gives to Grave on stage.

So here, with much fanfare, we present the lead cast of Feedback.