Joel Simon

  I attended a presentation where Joel Simon, the owner of Flickerpix talked about his work, how he started his company, and what kind of animation techniques they used. The film "Macropolis", by Joel Simon was the winner of best animation at the 10th annual IFTAs 2013. Flickerpix have produced a wide range of projects, including "On the air", which is a mix of stop motion, and 2D animation. Here is the companies website if you are interested in looking at his work: http://www.flickerpix.com/

William Simpson

I went to see a local exhibit to look at William Simpson's concept art for the TV series Game of Thrones. Here is a couple of pictures i was able to take of his artwork:

Iconic characters

Shiny Money are currently  in the process of making a new game, and they are trying to create a new iconic character. In order to achieve that, i have done some research by looking at iconic characters, such as Mario, Sonic, Lara Croft etc. and find out what makes them so iconic, and different from other video game characters.

Mario, Link and Donkey Kong were created in the 80's.  Mario is a short Italian plumber that has appeared in over 200 video games, and he serves as Nintendo's Mascot. The picture below shows the 3 characters evolution through time.

Lara Croft is a female iconic character. She is the main protagonist of the Square Enix video game series Tomb Raider, and she is presented as a beautiful, intelligent, and athletic English archaeologist-adventuress.

Video game characters have been developed to suit their game's genre, for example, for action, hack and slash games, characters with big muscles like Kratos (from the game God of War) and Dante (from the game Dante's Inferno) are created. If you are playing a side-scrolling platformer game, cartoon-like characters such as Mario and Sonic are created.