Character Design | Week 0: Research and Organisation [1]

For our first lecture of 'Toolkit 2: Drawing- Character Design', we were briefed with an overview of our lectures. We've 10 weeks to understand the methodology of character design, using one example, out of 24 potential combinations.
We'd started first, with a few quick exercises concerned with 'visual thinking', and 'awareness':

Next we were each handed an orange envelope, (each one dictating a specific individual scenario). I'd got 20...

20

Person: A secret Agent'
Conceit / Trait: 'Saul Bass; and 'Technological / Gadgets
World/Time: 1950's/1960's Chicago
Filmic Scene: In the HQ
Animation Action: 'Unleashing a gadget'.

Week 0 see's us working on our research and organisation skills.
Here's the influence maps, and notes I made for my designated character:

'Visual Look [1]'

'Visual Look [2]'

'Exterior [1]'

'Exterior [2]'

'Character'

> Blatantly obvious gadgets/showy personality.

> Clever gadgets and high intellect... but stupid in other contexts (i.e. leaning on a wall covered in wet paint: Get Smart, 1965-1970)

Notes

Late American Modernism: 

> "Now, that Heritage Architecture Studio is in the process of restoring the modernist prefabricated house, which Mies designed in 1952 for Robert McCormick, Jr., a sales agent, and his wife, poet Isabell Gardner, it has come to the center of attention."

http://www.daniellaondesign.com/blog/mies-and-the-mccormick-house 

>"Late Modernism is a boldly original and undoubtedly controversial study of how modernism was transformed, assimilated, and sometimes institutionalized after 1945, before being challenged in the 1960s and 1970s." 

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14791.html

Post Modernist Architecture America:

>"Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the international style advocated by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe." 

http://www.architecture.org/architecture-chicago/visual-dictionary/entry/postmodern/

> "Postmodern trends and ideas emerged out of the 1960s, a time when urban renewal projects led to the widespread demolition of many historic structures in urban centers like Chicago."

> Robert Venturi etc.

Kitsch

> "Kitsch- American Kitsch 1940 – 1960. Kitsch” is a German word meaning “in bad taste.”  1950's space age, communism and economism"

1950's-1960's Chicago Graphic Design/Magazines:

> Saul Bass, Germano Facetti etc. 

Photograph Sources: 

> Shorpy, Chicago History Museum, Vivian Maier (Chicago 1950's-1960's Street Photographer), Library of Congress, blogs etc.