3rd Year: Minor Project, African Crowned Crane Development

The African Crowned Crane, is going is be based on the idea of majesty and size in the animation.

The African Crowned Crane is an endangered species, which is something that can definitely be used in terms of design. Now this species of the crane being endangered makes it a rare bird, a rarity in anything generally means its something that is quite hard to come by, so for this bird to be a representation of rarity means it needs to be treated very particularly. The crane himself needs to be designed around the fact that he stands out from the rest of the crowd, or in this case, the flock?

Some of the key aspects of the design of the bird will focus on the idea that this is a creature to be admired, like looking at a painting or a statue. Your meant to look at this bird and go "Wow!", so things like an aurora are quite a good example, seeing as how it completely takes up the whole sky and can't really be ignored.

Then there are things like the statue and the chess piece, showing that this creature has a lot of tiny details that can be admired, like its feathers, crown, eyes, red skin tag and white/blue body/grey body.

I wanted to go for scale in these thumbnails and I think I did a reasonably good job of working out the shapes of some of these guys. I did experiment with more colors that I originally wanted but I think some of these turned out pretty nice!

Again, some of my favorites are numbers, 4, 7, 9, 10 and 13.

Thumbnail 4

Thumbnail 7

Thumbnail 9

Thumbnail 10

Thumbnail 13