The team at Cardiff animation studio Turnip Starfish were recently asked to produce some designs in an ‘Anime’ style for one of our clients. Two adverts were going to be produced, one targeting adults and one targeting teenagers. But the style needed to work across both adverts.
The Turnip Starfish Manga queen Lexemon will take you through some of her ideas.
For the adult ad I was asked to design 3 different characters that were a family unit and lived in space. The ad would have a 90s look so that it would appeal to an older audience. I took inspiration from shows like Ulysses, Cowboy Bebop and the short film Interstella 5555.
As I’m not familiar with drawing in a ‘sci-fi’ theme, I had to research different styles of space suit and designed it with what the client wanted in mind.
For the teen ad I was asked to create a teenaged character that looked neither male or female with an introverted personality. For this advert I mostly took inspiration from the character Juuzou from Tokyo Ghoul. Juuzou is quite a complex character and he is often mistaken for being a girl. The design for the ads character was quite complicated to get right as most of the designs ended up looking too masculine. Getting the character to look the right age was also tricky as the more introverted the character looked, it seemed to make them look younger. In the end I managed to get the balance right and the client was happy with the results!
