Car Smash Shock Man

You may notice a pattern that a few of these characters have no real name, but are just named after the scene they briefly appear in. So far, designing this man has been rather difficult as I wanted to squeeze a bit of Halas and Batchelor Charlie character into him. Again, a very important character as he is involved in a key scene of the film so his design needs to look as good as possible and not to ruin the 'universe'.

Early beginnings here. I think this is the first sketch of getting the image of this man being suprised and in terror when a demolition ball causes a chunk of rainbow to fall on his car.


Here's the kind of stance I was looking for. Minus the car. Because I was originally thinking of having two short scenes. A man in terror jumping back and a empty car being smashed by a bit of the rainbow, I blended both together for effect and for comic relief, or at least to get a bit of squash and stretch in there.


The shock reaction for these scene has to look perfect, and the exaggeration isn't quite there yet.

This illustrates the short scene almost perfectly, that moment where he's supposed to jump back in shock, in a completely exaggerated Chuck Jones directed manner. But, yeah, that actual arch doesn't look like he's that bothered, actually he looks kind of cool about the situation.


So because of the car smash drawing being a random sketch of finally flushing that scene out of my head to paper, I found out to my annoyance, I couldn't draw the man again.

I spent most of an evening of television trying to figure out this man's head shape and why I couldn't quite hit it again. It was very frustrating, EXACT angles and from this exercise, I started figuring out how to build him again and in a far speedy manner.

I couldn't get that jump right. His form and rhythm weren't yet putting out that desired effect and he looked as if he was floating like a feather, instead of spontaneously jumping back cautiously in terror of something that just got crushed by the side of him.


Here, I added the tie being blown into his face by the force of the car/rainbow piece collision.

Then I drew a picture of him looking like a right so-and-so.


Meanwhile, that angle of him jumping still wasn't right. I knew how to draw his head, but the exact angle of the nose was the most precise part of his faces' design.


Again, I questioned myself. This time about his eyes. I wondered if his eyes were too much MY style, so I tried a few different set of eyes. By doing this, I got a perfect reaction with the Dennis the Menace (Beano) eyes of his initial shock.

And this is a little test just to see if I could exaggerate the guy with my trademark OTT facial animation whilst keeping the retro look in. I think it worked, this kind of look would only be in a few frames.


So then I found a much better nose, because his accented nose was beginning to get annoying and this made him look like a modern Charlie more than I could ever imagine.

So I made a quick profile pic of that, just to figure how to construct his head again and refined it.

And finally, I got that tilted car smash reaction I was looking for, just by looking purely at form and rhythm and breaking it right down to the line on the far left, so then I warped that line slightly on the far right to draw the guy jumping with his feet off the ground. I also made myself most of a model sheet in the process. A big bingo to celebrate that as it had been annoying me for about 3 days straight and a good few weeks, even before the character was conceived.

Here's a quick thumbnailed sequence of that event. Yes, that's right, the last two frames.

Originally edited - 07/Feb/2010- Will update when designed more