Winston development / OIAF 2016

Today marks the last day of OIAF 2016. It's always so great to see old friends, make new ones, and experience the camaraderie among fellow industry folk. This year I was a part of a development panel called "Forks in the Road" about the specific path our productions took to eventually end up on TV. (Image below borrowed from Startoon)

I'm not the most seasoned public speaker, so unsure of just how much constructive information was actually conveyed, but appreciated the opportunity to be a part of the panel none the less. Thank you Michelle and Brandon (and Jamie and Miles) for the experience.

As part of the panel, I put together a few images on the various stages of Winston design throughout development and thought it might be something worth sharing here as well. 

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Winston Steinburger and Sir Dudley Ding Dong originated in 2009 as a short film idea. Although it did get finished, and there were parts that I felt came out pretty funny, I was never happy enough with the final product to release it to the public.

The next stage of development came when I entered the "pitch this" contest at the Ottawa Animation Festival in 2010. I ended up entering the Winston idea and formatting quite a bit of what I did for the original short film into a pitch for the series. It was at this stage that the characters started to become a bit more refined, with the addition of Hampton the Hamster who started out as one mean dude in a flying hamster ball. 

The follow stage of development came after the show was picked up for development by Teletoon (and it's distributor E-One Family). We were commissioned to make a short demo for the series and below are the updated designs we used. *Note - Pam (the girl in the top left corner) and Hampton (the hamster) were designed by Mr. Steve Lambe while in production with Mercury Filmworks. 

After that, the designs moved on to the next phase of development which was putting together the series bible, as well as marketing and promotional documents. Winston and Dudley ended up staying the same, while Hampton (the former hamster) again got an update into more of an alien creature. A few more characters were also added at this point including Sgt. Sasha Spritz (Winston's hero), and Cutty (Winston's guardian and owner of the restaurant where Winston and Dudley work).

The next round of redesign came after the show was officially green-lit for production. There was a request to age Winston up, so the following exploration was based off of that request. 

And here are the final designs for the series (went with #2 from the above choices and then refined his structure a bit to feel a little more lose). You can ignore the "older version" warning on Hampton as this was based off of a few things inside his build.