Alma – character notes
The film follows the main character, Alma.
We first see her in almost total isolation, living with her grandfather in a flooded homestead at the edge of a world she barely knows.
Over time, Alma becomes someone who is constantly learning and adapting: fishing, foraging, caring for animals, building new homes, discovering and eventually raising a family.
A lot of Alma’s character design is built around that same history of adaptation. Her clothing, hair, tools, and physical environment should all feel accumulated rather than designed at once: repaired, borrowed, scavenged, learned, and altered as her life changes. She isn’t meant to read as a traditional post-apocalyptic heroine so much as an ordinary person who becomes extraordinarily capable because she has had no alternative.
Character Design
Character design has never been a strength of mine. I’m not going to even post the initial sketches of her as they embarrass me.
I spent a lot of time on Instagram, trying to find a character designer whose work I loved, but the style trends feel a little too cartoony. I love the work of Brian Froud
And of course Moebius
But I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do any sort of style justice.
For a minute I considered trying to have AI come up with some designs, but it felt horrible going that direction, and I really wasn’t happy with any of the designs anyway so it didn’t work.
At some point, Epic Games and Unreal Engine released the earliest version of Metahumans and I did some initial designs for characters using sculpted versions of Metahumans. I got Alma KIND of to a place where I felt Okay about her designs. From left to right, were the different iterations, the right-most being the “final” version with custom hair groom.
But “okay” was the best I felt, and it really weighed on me how little I actually liked the way they looked. I knew I had to really scrap the design altogether and come up with a different approach, seeing if I could push how stylized the characters looked. (seriously… look how terrible those are)
At some point, doom-scrolling instagram, I saw some old wooden puppet characters. I didn’t want to make the characters look as though they were literally made of wood, but it let me push the designs a little more stylized with a specific direction in mind.
Being someone who is NOT really a sculptor, I had a hard time doing the whole body at once. Luckily, a really stupid and convoluted process allowed me to essentially sculpt parts of her body – an arm, her torso, her head – bash those parts together. These were HEAVILY inspired by wooden puppet designs. I’d then take that messy geometry into a mesh wrapping app and eventually to Unreal Engine’s newer (UE 5.8) Metahuman creator. So I ended up with FULLY customized character designs that could still be animated with the Metahuman animation rig, which was going to mean the faces had really high fidelity for expressions.
And into UE:
And eventually, textured, clothed and .. uh.. haired?
It’s still possible her design will shift slightly as production continues, which is made possible due to the Metahuman “system” in UE, but fingers crossed it’ll just be a matter of sculpting more clothing and hair grooms.