Ok I've been thinking about the kind of characters that I want to create and model over the summer and I've decided upon the classic hero and villain. So what makes a hero? and what makes a villain? Well since I'm only designing a the look of the characters I can't really rely on having an epic back story to tell their stories so I have to do this through how they look, and make these two characters look different.
What I can think of is my vast knowledge of final fantasy. When designing their characters they often use mirror opposites on their main characters often the main antagonist and protagonist. For instance on the left is an image of the promotional artwork for the Final Fantasy 7 film 'Advent Children'. The character 'Cloud' (left) is meant to directly contrast the character Sephiroth (right), his blonde spiky hair the exact opposite to Sephiroths long silver hair. What is interesting is that the conventional use of colour to define good and evil isn't used here, typically the good guy will be dressed in bright vibrant colours while the bad guy will wear dark moody colours, here more subtle methods are used to determine good and evil. Again this presents a problem as I am only designing my characters not telling their story while in final fantasy the characters develop into their roles of good and bad, Sephiroth for instance started out a great hero and only turned bad after he found out he was created from some alien but that is another very long and confusing story for another time.
A better example of mirrored characters comes from Final Fantasy 8. The characters are exact opposites and rivals in everything, this is shown best in their character design. Squall (right) the main character has brown hair and a short jacket while his rival Seifer (left) has blonde hair and a long jacket. This use of mirror opposites is best shown in the scars they have on their faces. Given to each other in the epic opening movie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q09quI356sQ (watch it is awesome) they both go across their forehead and down under their eye in opposite directions. This is more of the idea I want to use two characters that are opposites in most ways, and it is easy to see that they contast each other in some way. It's going to be quite hard but fun at the same time and something that I really want to look into. If nothing else it will be good practice for my third year when I have to actually do this for a project.
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