Grover Colors

Things on the Grove front have been going well. I finished storyboards last week and I'm excited to go back to visual developement. The storyboard animatic isn't quite ready to go public quite yet, as there are some issues that need to be addressed. For starters, I had always imagined that the Grovers all looked the same. In my mind, there were three characters doing three seperate things who come together in the end. But after showing the animatic to a few trusted critics, I discovered that the seperateness of the three characters isn't so apparent to someone who hasn't been knee-deep in Groverness for the last six months. I realized that, as far as my story goes, the three Grovers could just as easily be the same Grover doing three things at different times. So it looks like the guys are going technicolor.
I'm hesitant to vary the colors too much since I don't want them to end up looking like Fruit Loops or something, plus there's the problem of keeping them all in line with the palate that I create for the Grove itself. But at the same time, the easier it is to immediatly differentiate between the three of them, the better. And with all three being exactly the same shape and size and lacking any kind of identifiable clothing, it's pretty much a done deal with the color. So I don't know. Blue Sky did a really good job of mixing up the colors of the characters in Horton Hears a Who, so I know it can be done. But it's still kind of intimidating. My initial thought was to just vary the shades of one color, like a medium orange, a lighter, yellower orange, and a darker, redder orange. My fear with that is that it could be taken as a race thing and then all of the sudden it's a "lighter skinned folks and darker skinned folks CAN be friends" thing, which limits it, I think. But, whatever. Moving on...

Here's the art. My vote for right now is "1, 2, & 3" or "1, Mi, and a darker, redder version of C". We'll see.