When MTC came with their untitled draft of Bandersnatch inspired Scenario Branched e-learning, I knew we have to go down the route of illustration just like the legendary ‘Connect with Haji Kamal’ by Cathy Moore. I titled the script as ‘The Choice’ you can watch the trailer down below.
Inspiration
Me and Tanzeel (Cursim’s Graphic Designer/Art Director) sat together and bounced off some ideas, we both agreed to take a ‘Noir’ approach just like the illustrations of Frank Miller in Dark Knight Returns or Sin City, mainly because the time constrain at the time to quickly produce a demo.
We put together a ‘mood board’ to give an overall description of what we are going to produce. The illustration mood board consisted of some of my illustration mixed with Noir style illustration including Frank Miller’s and other random images we picked up from googling.
http://www.deviantart.com/roelworksThe client particularly liked the style of this particular image from my gallery on deviantart
Character Design
It wasn’t clear in the initial draft on who the main characters are except that the learner will be the ‘Offender Manager’ (or probation officer in the US) who will have to manage a ‘Service user’ (Offender on probation), no other information was given on how both of the characters should look like.
To make the process easierr I had MTC describe them as if their casting their characters for movies, so they came up with these descriptions; The service user should be based on Robert Kazinsky (from Eastenders – a legendary british soap) and the Offender should be based on Marianne Jean Baptiste ( a academy award nominee British actress). MTC also agreed to give a name to the Service user.
Based on those initial design I developed several expression that fits the story of ‘The Choice’
We keep the colour scheme to the minimum, with hints of MTC brand colours in it particularly the blues.
