"Meet the Patels" Character designs

Sometimes when you work in the world of freelance, you'll work on a project that will never see the light of day. Hopefully, you are paid for your time and have a sample of your hard work, but for some unknown reason, the project is never completed.

Luckily this time, a project I worked on is finally finished and here's a link to "Meet the Patels." This film took 6 years to make, but the filmmakers stuck to their goal and it premiered at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto where it was voted #2 favorite audience choice. I recently saw the film at the Los Angeles Film Festival and was happy to hear the response of the audience. Here's a clip of the animation from the film.

My involvement with the project was to create character designs of the real family members as animated characters for the documentary. It took some time to design each character and to find a way to make a style that related to one another. I think the best way to do this is to start with the main character and draw a lot of different designs based on that character. I first did a lot of drawings, trying out different styles and trying to find a fun cartoon style. These were usually done to find the style that I liked and could refine.

 Then I took a batch of designs and labeled each one A, B, C, etc. to show Ravi and Geeta. From their comments, I would be able to refine the character designs to fit the style of the film. Here are the final character designs.

I learned a lot about character designing during this project and I think I did the best I could to do doing my part of the job. If you get a chance to see this film, its a very good film and if I hear more about it, I will add to this post.