Towels - Character Design
“Sculptors Henry Moore and Elizabeth Frink inspired the character design on Towels. Emotional appeal, strong silhouettes, dynamic forms, pathos and drama was all apparent in their works.”
Katharine Nicholls
“To take inspirational elements from these sculptures into 2d animation and to retain the power these 3d forms have, required lots of trial and error that was not just about the character design process but was also irrevocably connected to cinematography choices too.”
Katharine Nicholls
Towels (2019)
"It probably is part of my subconscious that in that even though I tried my best to make the characters ambiguous, I mean androgynous. They still had a dominating very intense energy about them. I think it actually reflects a society.. well c'os we still live in a society that is, you know, male dominant in a lot of big power roles."
Prawta Annez
Character sheets by Prawta Annez and Eric Lin. Painting used as style reference is Day Trippers by Becky Blair
Rosa Mulraney How much did you get to know your character? Did you how far did you go into your character's backstory? Can you tell us a little bit about that? How much do we know about David and Bowie?
Prawta Annez To be honest, I kind of always thought of them like people on a stage. I mean, I weirdly enough, I normally like with my other characters, I kind of normally do create like a back story to the point where they sometimes even have grandkids or like, I don't know, worlds where they come from. But strangely enough for David and Bowie, I kind of just kept it almost within the border of the story. So they didn't really go past the beach. I think at one point we played with the idea of possibly them getting a bus journey to the beach, but that's about it. They were just that that was probably their life cycle. There's just the beach. I mean, and if they were real characters, they probably would just live in a Groundhog Day on the beach all day long.
