Characters, personalities and voices (30/1/2014)

* We found out today that we won't be giving our presentation until the 13th of February. Therefore, Ed and I concentrated on selecting the characters and their designs that I will further define. 

Captain: Decided that the captain should be strong, but should look out for the crew, as they do him, despite him always putting them first.

• Personality: Keeping a stiff upper lip for the crew's sake, the captain has been going through a lot recently and therefore the crew is keeping an eye on him. Kind and considerate to his crew, this character is far less inclined to fight than most. However, when someone messes with his crew or his friends, he completely changes character and won't forgive his enemies. 
• Design: Human in a captain's uniform that is a mix of both sci-fi and 19th century military.

Pilot: Instantly appealing to Ed. He felt this character would work as he reminded him of himself and of a character in 'Sharpe' that he liked.

• Personality: A drinker, a gambler and a guitarist. Once part of a band, he now flies the ship without hardly ever saying a word. Only speaking to ask simple questions or sing a song.
• Design: Similar to Ed's punk rock look e.g. wristbands, shirt, leather, mo hawk hair etc. Keep him humanoid with elements of an alien. He will also have a visor over his eyes to help him pilot as it helps him calculate, interface with the ship and/or help him see through blindness.

Mechanic: Realising that we had a lot of positive characters and not enough non positive ones to balance the group, we decided to make him grumpy and old fashioned. Also older than the others.  

• Personality: Always complaining, the mechanic hates surprises and just wants to take on easy missions so he has nothing serious to fix. Old fashioned in his ways, he also hates to throw away things. 
• Design: A big fat alien wearing a mechanics suit (similar to the fat pig/dog like mechanic I drew on the first character concept page). He will closely resemble a creature from Earth, possibly reptilian or bird like. 

Muscle: Feeling that this character would add more emotion for us to play with, we also liked the fact that he wasn't just a run of the mill brute. 

• Personality: A large kind hearted being who wouldn't hurt a fly, but to be useful to the crew he puts on the tough hard-as-nails persona so as to intimidate people into telling him things / doing what he says rather than resorting to violence. 
• Design: A rock like golem.

The ship: Believing that the ship should have a personality in order to provide a contrast to the pilot's quiet personality, we made the ship cautious so as to make it another problem that the crew have to deal with. Therefore, not only do they have to make enough money for food, fuel and maintenance, but they also have to convince the ship to do what they want it to do.

• Personality: An overly cautious ship that doesn't like to take risks and has often to be convinced into doing things. 
• Design: The exterior should be non symmetrical and made up of multiple ships put together. Whereas the interior should look like the crew quarters of the star fighter seen in the first 'Alien' movie. I'll also experiment with possible interfaces for the ship to interact with the crew, could even experiment with the bubble of water idea I had a while back.

Dock worker: Decided to combine two aspects to make him a really despicable character rather like Watto from 'Star Wars' who we are basing him on and who Ed can do a great impression of.

• Personality: A tight fisted, grubby and greedy individual who only cares about one thing, money. All he wants is for the crew to be done with the payment and signing of documents as fast as possible so he can go back to sleeping or drinking. 
• Design: Doesn't really matter at the moment. Will come up with both alien and robot designs.

* Finding an empty room we worked on our voices and showed one another what we felt confident in. We were able to come up with the following voices, though we plan to go away and come back next week having had time to further experiment with our range without being put on the spot.

Voices:

• Captain - Me: Regular voice
• Pilot - Ed: Regular voice
• Dock worker - Ed: Watto impersonation
  

* Talking to our lecturer, we were all really enthusiastic about the idea. He reckoned that we should play around with our voices and have fun. Since both me and Ed don't want to fall out over a group project we felt this was a good idea and agreed to keep each other in the loop and work out a fair share of the roles.

* We also sat down and watched the video cast reveal for 'The Elder Scrolls Online' in which it show cased numerous well known actors talking about their characters, what they understood about them and even showed how they performed them. Thus this video was useful to watch as it allowed me to look further into the voice recording process.

Harvard Referencing:

• Bethesda Softworks (2014) The Elder Scrolls Online - Voice Cast Reel. [Online Video] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na-Jun_uRFQ (Accessed: 30/1/2014).