Shelly Page Brief: Beauty and the Beast: Research

I wanted to take a break from the Vehicle Design brief and started working on something different.  Shelly Page set an additional brief based around character design.  From a list of characters she provided (including the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Helen of Troy and Hades) we had to redesign this character in a modern day/futuristic or even alien world setting.  Going into this brief, I already had an item of some of the things I was wanting to achieve with my character designs, so I chose Beauty and the Beast.

So, first things first, the research...

The most obvious resource for this was the Walt Disney film.  However I decided to dig into the background of the original fairy tale and tried to ignore its existence.  From the story, there's no defining description of the 'Beast'.  Original drawings that accompanied the story many years ago have different takes of the design, including large boars to goblin/devil designs.  It was mainly from the 1930's - late 1990's where the more Werewolf designs started taking place.  But even now, that's beginning change as interpretations of classic 'monsters' are being reinvented.  Unfortunately I think this might be due to the Twilight phenomenon.  The 'Beastly' image is a good example of this.  So I started thinking outside the box a little, and thought of other classic relationships between a female lead and a 'creature'.  So I looked at films like An American Werewolf in London and even, to an extent, Alien and Alien3.  A idea started forming of what I was wanting to achieve with this relationship.

I wanted to set my characters in the future, so I started looking at 'modern' fashions designs for male and females...

I also stated having another idea I wanted to experiment with.  I want the Beast to look human for the most part.  However, in different lighting (mainly ultra violet) I want his appearance to become more ghastly.  So I did some research and the colour difference wit UV lighting too.

Let's start cracking out some designs!