Cereal Character Development

For the first session of the year with Jay we were doing some character development to use as part of a cereal box, the branding of which we'd have to also come up with.

Inspired by some of the work done by last years students which used some clever word play and was branded as Cereal Killers which used a cereal hoop which was holding a spoon dripping in blood as its main identity, I took a less than traditional approach and decided to use a zombie theme.

We started with some initial sketches of how our characters would look, trying to not take too much care of how it looked, as the sketches weren't meant to be this well presented final thing, they were meant to be a way of just getting some ideas down.

My character is a zombie, and has some chunks missing from his head as if another zombie has eaten his brains. I thought this would be a good way to have the cereal inside the guys skull so it was kinda like a bowl, and the zombie now had only cereal on his mind and is fueled by his breakfast - a good way to portray how important breakfast is to children. And because he has cereal for brains he has milk dripping from his lips rather than saliva or blood like traditional zombies would.

This page also shows some variation in poses and expressions that the character can have, my favorite is the little one in the middle which shows my character when hes been surprised by something with all some of the cereal and milk jumping from his skull as he  jumps up in shock.

The second page of sketches some more of this development and considers some different angles as well as beginning to look at how it would look on the front of a box.

I think I struggled with getting the angles and perspective right for the isometric views.

The next step was to starting to consider the layout for the front of the cereal box. For this we had to consider the positioning of the character, the name of the brand and tagline/slogan, as well as any additional elements, in my case tombstones or the bowl of cereal. To get the proportions of this right we just drew around some of the individual portion boxes of Kellogg's cereals like Frosties and Rice krispies.

I really like this project and I am interested in how this will develop.