Spider creature design

Here is a thought process behind another of the creatures from the "Playground - trailer"

The fist idea I had was for a scene, where children trying to escape a spider like creature on a spider web/ playground climbing net. I wanted to bring horror to a usually happy and palyfull place, that's was one of the core ideas of all of the project, mixing horror and colorful kid games.

Then for the creature I thaught of a spider like creature that whould chase the kids onthe surface of the climbing tower. The spider creature would be quite massive compared to the kids, so I asked myself how could it reach the kids if they hide into the climbing net structure. That's when I thaught of the spiders that carry all of their babies on their abdomen, and maybe this spider babies would detach and chase the kids.

I then tried mixing the idea of little spiders coming from their mom's abdomen and a shape box toy I had when I was kid. This idea of mixing things in an unexpected way is sometimes how our brain works when we have nightmares and imagine some bizarre imagery. This mixing idea was used for most of my creatures ideas, tying to come up with original and scary ideas by mixing together two completely different things ( like a toy and a scary spider).

Here is the toy shape box, each little spider would pop out of the big spider body. Each would have a different shape.

Here is the fisrt super roughs of the spider creature, this are quite awful because I never expected anyone to see them, it was mainly finding a general shape for the creature.  At first, as you can see the belly/ toy box part where the small spiders pop out from was on the front side, like a big head.

But I thaught it wasn't very scary so I decided to test other overall shapes, and ended up making it more humanoid with the toy box/ shape being it's belly, like a pregnant creature.

You can see here how the idea started very rough and got refined until arriving at an overall design that I liked. The shapes had eyes at first, this idea changed in the final design.

Once the design was finished, I had to make it work on the different shot in wich it would appear. Here are some rough framing ideas for the sequence.

The final drawing with the little star close to it, is very close to the final design from the trailer. 

Here I had my overall shots for the sequence so I started layouting it on photoshop. I like to make little drawings and researchs on sketchbooks, and switch to computer and digital drawing only when I need to do the layout.

Then I added color to make some still frames. To see how the general mood of the sequence would look like.

And here is the final sequence! I wanted here to mainly show the design and idea evolution at each step. I will do more in depth animation step by steps in the future! 

Hope you liked this post! Let me know what do you want to see more, and if you like this kind of post.

Thank you again for your support!