Mood Boards - Cavemen & Vikings

I have been thinking about what ancient civilisation to choose from for the past week and have narrowed it down to either Vikings or Cavemen. I still can't decide which one of these to do, so have created two mood boards for both of these.

Vikings

Cavemen

At the moment I am leaning towards creating a cavemen, as the character I have in mind for it will be in a cartoony style. His personality will be quite goofy, yet he will be big and loveable - a personality I'm sure most kids will like. Though I'm still unsure as there isn't much to be created for a caveman (clothes wise), and if I were to create a caveman, I would like to add fur to it in 3DS Max, however the loading time of it is putting me off the idea too!

As for the viking, I think this could be more suitable to create as there's more accessories and different clothing that can be made compared to the caveman, but I'm finding it difficult to imagine a viking which can be seen as iconic to kids for some reason, but I will see...

Mood Board of Ancient Civilisations

I have gathered several different images together and put into a mood board; these shows the different types of Ancient Civilisations that I could use and base on for my character. I have tried to find images that portrays different personalities through the types of clothing they wear as well as background cultures/ways of life etc.

The images includes the periods of Cowboys, Red Indians, Romans, Vikings, Egyptians, Victorians, Cavemen Era, Knights (Medieval) and Acient Greece and Chinese.

Favourite Animated Character

I have several favourite animated characters that come to mind. But rounding down to two, it would be the following:

The first one is a character called 'Dory'. from the film 'Finding Nemo'. The first obvious reason why she is one of my favourites is because I have a love for fish (pets)! I find them to be interesting animals - no matter what people say, they DO have individual personalities! In this case, Dory has a very funny side to her. She suffers from short term memory loss and therefore her character forgets everything extremely quickly! It makes her quite dumb to say the least, and is why she is such a loveable character! Her voice is also high pitched, and matches her personality quite well; this makes her outgoing and wild at the same time.

The second one is a character called 'Hammy', from the film 'Over the Hedge'. Reasons why I chose Hammy is because he has a clear loving side to him. He is just portrayed as very sweet and is made out to be sort of a push over, which leads him to doing stupid things (such as drinking a can of fizzy drink, and he goes VERY HYPER from this!). Very funny and cute.

First Thoughts

My very first thoughts of this module is simply "OH DEAR!"

The brief is on producing a character based on an ancient civilisation, which could become iconic and loved by children, and become someone that children can identify with.

Whilst the brief sounds fun to do and is on an interesting topic, I feel and know that I will struggle greatly as animation is a weakness of mine, and I am not very confident with animating at all. Although once I get into the swing of things I will hopefully get to grips with it all.

That aside, it will be a good challenge and I hope to create a suitable character for this module. It will be fun experimenting with the different facial expressions and capturing the body movements too.