Fire Tests

Fire Swap

Since both Hades and the Beheaded One have different appeals, one being a protagonist and the other, an antagonist, I wondered how much their fire contributed to their character appeal. I decided to swap their 'fire styles' to test this.

I used scenes where their fires exploded and changed colour so their actions would be a controlled variable and true to their character. I animated a rough character (since that is not the highlight of this test), and animated these:

Hades animated with the limited animation style of the Dead Cells trailer 

The Beheaded One animated in an (almost) Disney style

In these 'new' versions, Hades feels like a more comical character, and less intimidating, while the Beheaded One feels like a strange, mysterious character. Needless to say, their appeal has definitely been affected by the style of fire.

What went well:

• Testing out the styles from before really helped while making these,
• Keeping the character animation unchanged helped show the effect the fire art style had on appeal,
• The fact that they are on opposite ends of their respective stories helped contextualise and prove that fx do influence character appeal.

What could be improved:

• A lot of this could be defined as character animation, I may have to try to find out the difference between character and fx animation.