What I did:
With ‘Retired John’ complete and production-ready, the next character variant needed was a 40s/50s version of John for scene 3 – a brief scene showing him walking to his car, polishing the IAM badge and driving away. Given the short screen time, the decision was made to duplicate 30s John and make targeted adjustments rather than building an entirely new character.
The changes needed fell into three areas: clothing, hair and subtle facial ageing.
Clothing
The suit was reworked to feel more authentically 1980s. The material was changed to a finer grey fabric, replacing the heavier texture of the 1970s suit. The shirt collar was reduced in size – the wide collars of the 70s gave way to something more restrained by the 80s – and the colour changed to white. The tie is now pink, I remember a lot of pink in men’s fashion of the 1980s. Turnups were added to the trousers, the pocket flaps were removed from the jacket and the buttons changed. These are small details but they add up to a character that reads as a different era without requiring a full costume rebuild.
Hair
The hairline was receded very slightly to suggest the passage of time, and the sideburns were shortened to reflect the changing fashion of the decade. The hair itself is now grey. These changes are subtle enough to read clearly on screen without requiring extensive remodelling.
Face
A few gentle creases were sculpted into the face – nothing dramatic, just enough to suggest a man in his forties rather than his thirties. The eyebrows were modified slightly, following feedback from a supervisor as too heavy on the interim ‘Retired John’ model.
Rigging and weight painting
After remodelling the clothing, some weight painting adjustment was needed around the new turnups, where the geometry had changed.
Shape keys are still working correctly on the face. The ‘MouthSad’ shape key was removed as it isn’t needed for scene 3, keeping the rig clean and only carrying what’s actually required. Eyebrow posing controls were not added to this variant for the same reason: the scene doesn’t call for expressive eyebrow movement, so there’s no point in the overhead.
What I learned:
Working from an existing character and making targeted changes is significantly faster than building from scratch, provided the base mesh is clean and the rig is solid. The key discipline is knowing what you actually need for the specific scenes the character appears in, and not over-engineering beyond that. A character used in a single brief scene doesn’t need the same facial rig complexity as the main character across multiple scenes.
The supervisor feedback on the eyebrows was useful; it’s easy to become blind to your own work after staring at it for hours, and having that external eye pick up something like eyebrow weight is the kind of thing feedback is for.
Next:
With all character variants now prepared (30s John, 40s/50s John, Retired John and Nursing Home John) animation begins in earnest. The timeline from here is extremely tight. What was originally planned as three weeks of rendering alone now has to accommodate full animation, renders, score finalisation and delivery to user testers, all within three weeks.
Fortunately, composer Martin has already delivered a first draft of the score based on the alpha production animatic, which is a significant milestone. Some tweaks are needed before it can be finalised against the completed animation cut, but having music to work to (even in draft form) makes a big difference to the animation process.
The plan is to animate and render scene by scene rather than waiting for the full animation to be complete before rendering begins. Completed scenes will be rendered overnight while animation continues on the next. The target is to have the film ready for user testing by 20th April, giving testers enough time to respond before the beta submission deadline of 26th April. There is a small amount of flex in that testing window, but not much.
It’s going to be a busy few weeks.
