More on the project I’m doing with Mike Ellis, which now has a more permanent title, Aiming at Mountains, Shooting at Stars. Next up is the owl character named Nikolai.  I was over at Mike’s last night and we started hashing out the concept, it took about 4 hours to get to this point.

The character design has been tricky with the Nikolai, as he’s made mostly of feathers. I wanted to come up with a way to make each feather animated individually, and its pretty messy right now, but well on it’s way to a really polished rig. This version is a very very raw prototype, it focuses on the actual movement of the character, not so much the looks, the details will be worked in as the designs are finalized. For now, I think its a great start. Still to go are textured feathers, eyes, a better beak, legs, and a whole mess of coding and programming so the feathers behave.

Anyway, mike’s been posting on his blog about the project, and summed up the designs quite well;

“At this moment I have the two main characters designed, Isaac (a shy and lovable boy) and his friend Nikolai (a cute barn owl who lives in a strawberry tree). Nikolai’s “bird house” is also a character who shows various emotions through the features of his facade. The title of Nik and Ike’s adventures is tentatively called “Aiming at Mountains, Shooting at Stars” which may or may not change. The first general storyline is still in development, however we still have a lot of work ahead of us as we develop our characters and sets with more detail.”

Read more here.

So tomorrow we start to talk about scripts! Check Mike’s site for other updates.

There are more sketches after the jump: