Syfy channel campaign - thought process

Out of all of the projects we had a choice from this one seemed the most suitable for me. The Syfy channel wanted a new campaign to encourage people to watch their channel more, we were given a lot of freedom in terms of what the actual outcome could be, may it be a short animation for adverts or posters that would go on large billboards and so on. We were given one strict rule and that was that we couldn't use any content from existing shows that are aired on this channel which made sense seeing as they wanted something new and fresh. Also perhaps it may have something to do with licencing and copyright claims etc.

Either way this project was calling my name as it would give me a chance to better my character design skills and work within a genre that I am comfortable in. There are so many sub genres within Science fiction so I would also have a wide field to play on. To kick things off I just flicked through some of the programs that have aired on the Syfy channel, I did this to gauge the genre range and diversity. Below are some of the more popular shows that I came across.

There is a lot going on here, the overall diversity of the Syfy channel is very impressive, they have programs about vampires, angels, starship captains, space cowboys and even live action cartoon remakes. Now obviously the programs above are the high end shows, the Syfy channel also shows a lot of low budget films and programs and they are proud of that, they wanted us to share that passion and consider this passion within our designs.


Along with this general research I also gathered together some classic science fiction posters as a reference. I also really love retro science fiction posters so I was sure to get some inspiration from them in one way or another.

I love the way the text just pops off of each one, also a big fan of the Mars Attacks poster as it seems to have a modern twist to the style and their expressions are perfect. The older ones have a cloudy pastel look to them and it really enforces their age and authenticity, it is a style that is often emulated, a timeless classic.


Within the sketchbook folder there are some sketch pages that show my idea pathway, it starts with loose generic sceince fiction sketches featuring robots, aliens and ray guns. this was to warm myself up and get the feel for science fiction.

For research I looked at Futurama which is one of my favourite science fiction cartoons, I felt like this was not only appropriate because of the content but I felt like the target audience was also similar to that of the Syfy brief (18-25 year old's).

I also chose Futurama as my main reference because I feel like it comically mocks our expectations as to what the future will look like. 1000 years down the line and robots are still clunky and crude, some are even made of wood!
The program also features cowboys that live on the moon and a planet of giant Amazon like women who despise men. A lot of playful concepts have came out of this show and I love the way that Matt Groening has stylized his characters and i'd like to take inspiration from this.

Whilst I was drawing and playing around with ideas I remembered that in the previous module I allowed my favourite childhood cartoons to inspire my work, it was like there was always one cartoon that I could relate to within my research. That theory proved relevant for me during this brief also, above are some cartoons that helped me along my way.

After sketching out some characters for a while I noticed a theme, scientists and brains seemed to be where my head was leading me so I extended on the idea. The image above and to the left was the first rough for my scientist character, I wanted him to have a brain in his head and I wanted to give the brain some life too so that they would act as two separate characters. He was going to be a full scale person but instead I liked the idea of having a head in a jar and within the jar the head has another jar on his head for his brain (quite the mouthful). I started to draw other interactive characters to the left, there are some loose fish drawings, they would have mixed emotions about sharing their jar with a human head and his brain.

The sketch folder shows my pathway through this scientists design, above however are some characters that I had considered whilst mapping out my ideas. I drew brains with eyes from the beginning and it was a week or so into the project before I remembered that there was yet another cartoon that I could use to link in. The purple bear on the far right was from a show called Evil Con Carne and he was controlled by a talking brain in a jar upon his head. My brains varied from this design but it was again worth considering as I did not want to rip this cartoon off.