Toolkit 2 Character Design: Character and Environment Developments

Continuing with my Western film research, I chose to watch the classic 1966 Spaghetti Western Django, which follows the same named protagonist. The hero hauls himself into town carrying a mysterious coffin and followed by a prostitute he saves in the films opening scene. The film unfolds as Django gets swept up in the towns feud between a Klan of southern racists and Mexican revolutionaries. 

To replicate the narrative of a western in my own narrative, I have stuck with the idea of personal drive as the rolling theme (similarly to Django and Stagecoach). In my story Dungo, the dung beetle protagonist, is seeking his nemesis who lives somewhere in town. When Dungo was just a larvae, this nemesis promised our main character that he would grow up to be a butterfly, opening up opportunities for wealth and success. However, Dungo develops into a dung beetle instead and deals with daily turmoil and bullying whilst living at the lowest class level in society. Dungo seeks revenge...

Django heavily inspired this second protagonist character design; using a similar name, costume and coffin idea. I tried to scale my design to fit the world of insects, this can be seen through the use of a match box instead of a real coffin. This scaling practice was a good opportunity to reflect on the practicalities of the bug western town I was slowly creating. 

Django also gave me enough confidence to attempt an environment design. The use of trees and animal skulls give a sense of scale. Architecture uses bug hotel reference to create believability. I tried to deign the layout in a manor that interacts with surrounding nature; tree roots and discarded human litter. 

A second angle of the same environment design.  I experimented with interaction again by using tree roots as bridges. 'how would a small civilisation use natural obstacles to their advantage?'