Borja Montoro Character Design

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Zootopia II

Some more Zootopia designs.

First, some Baby Cats. Expressions, poses and turn arounds...

...and then some more secondary bunnies. I made these poses after Nick Orsi's concepts, just to see how they would work in movement.

Yeap, this girl had hair on the top of her head. It would be removed for the final version.

Bunnies changed quite a bit from the first attempts till what you see on the screen.

Monday, March 14, 2016

Zootopia I

On the Spring of 2014 I was hired by Disney Animation to help on Zootopia's Character Designs. I went to LA to visit with the team for a week and then worked remotely from home in Madrid.

My task was helping Cory Loftis on his immense assignment. There were hundreds of animals to be done and at that time we still didn't know pretty well what each one was going to do on the show, except from the main characters: Judy Hopps the rabbit and Nick Wilde the fox, who had already been designed by Cory by the time I got into the movie.

Thus, everyone was kind of like main character and had to be treated as one of them. That was the challenge.

I spent several months doing what is called "Art Packeting": I would be sent a single drawing made by Cory or by Shiyoon Kim -a drawing which had already been approved by the Directors among different Concept Art proposals- and then I had to work on that drawing to get it ready for the Modelling Department. Poses, gestures, facial expressions, turn arounds... That was what I did on all the fantastic stuff coming from them.

I had a blast on the show and feel very honoured to have been able to share credits on the screen with such a talented team. I feel so humble. I just learned plenty of things from these guys.

I want to also specially thank Mike Gabriel and Jin Kim, because they both recommended me to the Disney Visual Development Department to join the team. Thank you very much, guys.

And would like to thank Ann Le Cam, Byron Howard, Jared Bush, Clark Spencer, Monica Lago-Katys, Lauren Leffingwell, Jennifer Gandrup, Matt Roberts and Kellie Hoover as well for all their incredible help in making this remote collaboration possible. You're and incredible team, it's a pleasure working with you.

I'll be posting from today on some of the drawings I made during my Zootopia trip, starting with some rabbits I had to do at the very beginning of it.

Hope you enjoy them.

Thanks for reading.

Borja