Character Building

And not the kind that requires physical exertion. Here are my first character concepts, complete with the three "m's" to show what was going through my mind at the time.

P.S. Apologies for the long post; this is all my work from over the weekend as well as today.

 This was my first idea coming primarily from the idea of the mousetrap's sudden leap if you flip one upside down. I liked the idea of having a character that has a really reckless means of transportation that they aren't fully in control of.

 This is my favourite concept for meaning. I like the idea of a potentially menacing or creepy character could be stealing seemingly meaningless items when in reality he's just taking stuff others see as useless to construct a friend for himself.

 This is another character whose movement is my favourite feature. As he explores his environment he would use his aerial parachute thing to blissfully drift from place to place.

I pair these concepts together because they come from the same idea of materiality. Each is a protective vessel for a creature of liquid mercury within, whose eyes would be visible bobbing within. I do feel their purposes are a bit weak, however.

Here is my development of my favourite concept. After talking with the tutors I found it to be my strongest one. These are variants of the same idea of ballistic transportation. The main changes are that I have forced these characters to use their extreme leaping by making any other means of mobility highly impractical.

As it turns out I have been misinterpreting the brief and my organic materials/motion concepts were a bit off the mark. The challenge is to bring life to something otherwise lifeless. Our character will be a hybrid of characteristics of the objects we've chosen. My revised and reworked character is based off the following objects:

Materiality

Meaning

Movement

Looking at my precedents, I think the Steampunk design movement would be an awesome influence to incorporate into the design of my character and perhaps its surroundings.

The detail would not be nearly as intense as it would be a massive pain to model an environment that full on. Still, it's something worth considering.
The current stage I am at looks something like this:

This new character, influenced by the steam train, would be made of hard metal with a pair of steam valves on his back. The "goggles" are in reality his eyes and are not able to be removed from his head. The singular arm (joints based off of the digger arm, however once I redesign him orthographically I may base the shapes within the arm more precisely on it) would be used for both movement and manipulation. The meaning derived from the jet engine is also the main point of my narrative with this character; his quest for flight.
The concept for my story at the moment is sitting at this character being unhappy with his environment and wanting to escape to a brighter world (either over the fence of a garbage dump or out the window of a basement etc). His many attempts will result in disastrous failure until he collaborates his unsuccessful attempts into something that works and he is able to escape. The attempts will be covered in a montage style as to fit into the tight time-frame we have for the animation.