KINGDOM of the SUN - Rough ' Nina ' sketches and Animation Test

Here are a few of my rough sketches during the beginning months of Walt Disney's feature ' Kingdom of the Sun '. I was cast to the lead character ' Nina '  supervised by Doug Frankel. 

This was to be my 4th Main female lead character that i was to animate at Disney's. The others being Esmeralda, Meg, Mulan and now, Nina. I really liked the work Doug had done on her design up to this point. Having the face be wider in design but still keeping the appeal. And I loved the large shapes to work with regarding the hair and outfit, even the earrings. I love having shapes to play with regarding overlapping action and I was already visualizing how the hair could move in and out of actions, looking for appealing shapes and using the drag and follow through action as a nice accent to a movement.

We had some time at the beginning to discover the character, learning to drawn her to understand how her design could move around. 

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BELOW is a rough animation test i did of  ' Nina '. I was one of around a dozen animators or so that were on this film for around half a year. Production stopped on this film as the company reworked the story and recast the direction. The new film became ' The Emperors New Groove '. This film was more classic Disney in it's animated style - more traditional than the more comic style of ENG. This test of Nina is just a rough i was having fun with before scenes were cast out. It's rough, off model, not completed. It's also based on a good family friend Lisa Salamone Smith { Disney TV } who I tried to capture some of her personality as I have her walk towards the camera. At times Lisa would have her hair flop down over the side of her face while talking and then take her hand and brush it aside. I tried to put that in the test just to add a bit to the appeal of the performance. As mentioned, the test isn't finished, still in the rough stage, but you can see where I was going with it. :-)

Mark Pudleiner - Kingdom of the Sun - Rough ' Nina ' animation test from Mark Pudleiner on Vimeo.


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Here are 3 key poses from the first scene where I animated Nina. I was sorry when this story was stopped and along with it all the work done on the character. We moved on after a break to the new film 'The Emperors New Groove' which was a completely different story being animated in a completely different style. And that ended up being another positive experience.