NatureNes / First family
Co-Director with Marc Craste & Art Director / Designer
In the film, we follow the First Family, as their caveman clan grows from two to three.
Our hero parents have a first taste at parenting; first night’s sleep, first tooth etc. Challenging at first, our parents come into their own, as their natural instincts emerge.
Nature knows best.
Initial character design for the lead character.
The topic being prehistoric character, we decided to tap into the cliché of massive muscular scruffy-looking fur-covered humans. However, to give it a bit of a fresh design edge, the decision was taken to translate this at follow : everything character should have a very bulky, squarish feeling to it - with a bit of scruffy texture. Simple shapes also, for simpler times. And a few straps of textile here and there introducing a bit of rythme into the design.
Ultimately, the mother character had to appear in a different timeline, a current day timeline. Hence, she needed to be designed in a modern way too, in a recognisable way. On the right is where we landed - nothing say modern day time as a short fringe!
In this shot, it’s all about understated gestures and eye contact.
The design itself is reduced so that we can focus on the characters. A bit of fur, some prehistoric paintings
It’s all we need to have an idea of where we are!
Regarding backgrounds, we opted for something very airy and inspired by Japanese prints. The reason for it being that the action took place in a prehistoric context, highly detailed backgrounds would have drowned the characters as well as feel too classic. So, we went for something a touch more modern.
The colors are very earthy as far as the characters are concerned - but the background were meant to be neutral with strong bright color accents (bright blue, yellows etc)
The tree leaves are voluntarily reduced to a texture to contrast with the rigidity of the elongated graphic trees. The bulkiest bits in the images were meant to be the characters. This gives us different distinct design languages that all cohabitate to create a balanced composition that put the characters at the center of the attention
Secondary character also needed to be designed, to add credibility to the whole world. The challenge here was to expand costume design to read ‘prehistoric’ but still keep it on par with everything we already created
Naturenes / First family
Client: Nestle
Production Company: Studio AKA
Agency: BBH