Character Design for a Comic Noir Style film

In 2017, we had the chance to work for Ánima Estudios’ film called “Al Filo de la Frontera”, cutout animated movie about mafia, drug cartels and conspiracies. The art department went for a “comic noir” feel, which suited the theme very well. Our job was first to colaborate with the style exploration and later to design and develop characters for the film, many of which were based on real actors.

Every artist on the team colaborated with their own style exploration, and it was our coleague and friend Fernando Hinojosa’s style the one chosen by Ánima’s client. Once the style was stablished we made our tests in order to reproduce it faithfully:

Once the tests were done we were tasked to design secondary and extra characters for the film, from shop clerks to underground fighters, exotic dancers, bartenders, tourists, policemen, agents and so on. Here are some of the characters we designed.

Developing the characters

Once the design phase was over, we were tasked to develop characters we designed as well as characters developed by some of our coleagues. The development included character turnarounds, expression sheets and mouthcharts. Depending on how important a character was, it’s development would include more views, poses or specific expressions. This is an example of an important character: “El Gordo Aguirre”, character design by Fernando Hinojosa.

Here are some of the characters we developed for this film:

We really enjoyed working for this project, thank you for checking it out.