Death character design

Death 3D render, character of my 3d animation student graduation film DEIFIED

When our time has come, someone or something must  harvest our very essence, for the cycle of life to keep on going.

In this project, I was responsible of the entire creation process of this character from the early 2D researches to the animated and textured character ( only the rigging was done by Maria SGARALLINO and not by me). 

Creating a new iteration of Death itself was more challenging than I initally thought. In fact, re-inventing a character that has already been conceptualized and showed on screen hundreds through the years showed some real difficulty.

 This character had to be the very embodiement of divinity. Being both majestic and quite fearsome. I tried to recreate that with colors that fit such a concept well, by giving it specific proportions and by taking extra care of the conception of the hands and the face, as they were the parts that were shown the most on screen. Making Death entirely black was also a way to show that this deity did not and will never belong in the same world as we mortals do.

Since it was the main character of the movie I aimed to make it somewhat relatable by giving it big wide white eyes, as it would replicate the light you see at the end of the tunnel that your stare at helplessly. The mask worn further aims to dehumanize the entity by hiding most of the face and is made of spiky form to evoque Hell and satan's trident. The hands were designed to believably be the (only) ones that could grasp the very essence of life itself, the soul of us living beings and collect through the hourglass located in its chest which was shaped following the design of Death.

Regarding the outfit of the character, our goal was to go far from known concepts and create a character related as little as possible to human usual clothing regardless of the time, period of era while still remaining recognizable. I designed this unique hood with that in mind, an element that Death is often shown wearing in movies and games.

Here are some of the many sketches I made trying to grasp the concept of the entity I was aiming to create.

As you can see, I initially mainly focused on drawing  dark silhouettes as it was not only the best way for me to represent the essence of a divinity, but also a fast and efficient way to give my team as much propositions as possible regarding the limited time that we had to produce the film.

Finally, Death was designed to work together with Life and be echoes to eachother as the exchange their role in the next Death and Life cycle. For Life I only helped on the early sketches of the character, the rest of the pipeline was handled by the talented Maria SGARALLINO (2d Concepts) and Florian EMERY (3d sculpting and texturing).

Creating this character was a great experience, as I greatly enjoyed the entirety of the pipeline, and mostly the 2d research, the sculpting and finally the texturing. I am very thankful to the great team I have worked with on DEIFIED and look forward to create many more characters !