Chester the Chicken is a non-verbal character who only emotes with his eyes. He's a hard working farmer who's only goal is to sell his yearly harvest and protect his crops against pests.
In March of 2024 Pixel Blue College held hopefully what will be their first annual Animation Jam. 34 students and alumni were separated into 9 teams given the prompt of "unlikely pairs" and tasked to make a 60 second short within three days.
My group took the idea of "unlikely pairs" and decided upon a video game cross over, we took inspiration from games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing to design the farming sim game. The action character, John Vengeance was inspired by games like Doom and other character tropes to essentially make a parody of the badass action genre protagonist.
We decided Chester's main crop would be corn, so to design the bugs I looked into what pests target corn, and there was one beetle that fell perfectly into what I was looking for, the Japanese Beetle. They can fly, went after corn and can live anywhere. I knew I wanted the bug to have a bright pallet with patterns and be quite large. I played with a few different ideas on how the bug would move. 1. would be more passive, they use the flower to camouflage among flowers and to attract prey. 2. was a burrower, it dug its way into the corn with the pinchers and infested it from the inside out. 3. was designed to be more of a runner, they could still fly bit it wasn't their strong suit, they would charge into the fields using their size over the Chicken as their only offensive tool to invade. After going over the designs with the group and their feedback I put together design 4. giving him a large head, no bottom jaw only pinchers that come out of his face and work as little arms to push the food into his mouth. He drools an enzyme that dissolves anything and everything, big beady eyes that were always vibrating as well as two sets of wings and a hard shell over top.
We wanted to have a scene where the two characters look up at the sky only to see the inverse of the computer screen. I played around with two different ideas, a loading screen and the tool bar you'd see when playing a farming sim. We decided to go with the loading screen design.