Character Creations (circa Oct - Nov 05)

As I mentioned in the previous blog, the "Machines Don't Cry" characters I created with facial expressions are: Archer Lewis, Pahn-Peasaar, 5 yr old Emily, teenage Emily, and adult Emily.

There were actually 2 Archers and 2 Pahns. In the epilogue and near the ending, there were scenes of Archer and Pahn 20 years older. I made minor changes to the texture to make them look aged.

I used stock Poser models for the characters' heads. Archer is a human male. Pahn's head was slightly complicated. I took a stock male model head and with Poser, deformed it to a point where I though, "there's my alien!" If I made a face shape I didn't like, it was easier to start from scratch than to fix the problems. It took several iterations. In Mike Resnick's "Robot's Don't Cry" original story, the Baroni alien had 3 legs. In my script, the alien is bipedal.

It is interesting to note that the protagonists didn't have names in "Robots Don't Cry". Only Emily and the various robots have names.

I made the protagonists' first name, "Archer", like that of a hunter's since he was the equivalent of a treasure hunter. Archer's surname, "Lewis" is based after one of my favorite authors, CS Lewis. As for the alien, the original story referred to him as a "Baroni" alien. And at times he was called "the Baroni". The first thing I thought about before coming up with a name for him was pizza. I was thinking Baron Frozen Pizzas and the result was Pahn Peasaar after Pan Pizza. (Baron doesn't really have a Pan version of their Pizzas).

Emily was very complicated. I had 3 different models for her due to age differences in her role in the story. We see Emily as a young child, a teenager, a woman in her 20's and beyond. By the time Emily becomes a teenager, a disease limits her physically and emotionally. The disease affected her skin and made her look appalling to everyone. There were no detailed descriptions on how the illness affected her skin. I had to come up with a skin texture that visually demonstrated a horrible infection which progressed over the years.

By the time, Emily lived out to her 30's, the disease limited her walking and she used a "crudely crafted hoverchair" to get around. I had to model some type of craft that became part of the character. At first I was just going to stick the craft to her belly and turn her legs green so it would disappear in the greenscreen background. With Virtual Stage, it wasn't necessary. I discovered that I could just hid her legs inside the craft and make the character "sit on air". To put it another way, the character didn't have to walk on the 3d floor. Emily was floating with the craft and she had the freedom to move anywhere in the Virtual Stage software.

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