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Mama Lucchetti - Character Design Process
MADRE agency first came to us around first quarter of 2008 to help them bring this latest idea of theirs to life. The main idea behind the commercials was: mothers. The Mamá Lucchetti brand had always been, to this date, a real conservative one. MADRE´s idea was to reboot the brand, creating this cute-looking characters, but within bizarre and acid-like scripts that most kids, and whole family, could relate to. The first step for them was buying the rights for Manha-Manha’s song from The Muppets. The rest is history.
So we were approached to pitch in ideas regarding direction, final look, character design, and everything else.
During the first weeks a lot of sketches and ideas were thrown in the Agency's direction. These are some of them.
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Months were dedicated on finding the accurate tone and look for the characters. Tons and tons of sketches were drawn, supervised by our head character designer Juan Molinet and director Tomás García.
Our first full pitch came to look something like this:
After sketching a series of different characters and different looks, styles and morphologies, along with the agency we thought it would be better to carry on designing, not only in 2D but also in 3D, where the agency, and client, could understand much better where we were heading to. Characters were not only designed, but fully modelled and rigged, to test expressions and movement.
The characters were never designed alone or in singles. All morphologies and styles were designed to function as a family, so a mother, father, sister and brother (and sometimes a dog) were created and designed altogether at once to achieve the final style for the commercials.
The Agency decided they wanted our characters to be as cute, but also as expressive as possible. So we begun directly forgetting about limbs, hands and legs, and started focusing mainly on expressions: the face. So it was decided: let's go with a huge mouth.
Another important thing was wardrobe: should our characters be completely naked? Or should they have maybe some clothes on? The first tests only showed us that with such simple-looking characters, adding wardrobe to them would mean to actually re-design them based on their clothes from scratch, as they covered most of their bodies. So the idea was dropped off, except for some minor details, such as ties, bows, glasses, and so on.
All mothers were given real mother’s names, rather than code names or numbers. Many mothers were based on our own mothers as well, which made a lot of the design process really fun for the whole team (and families). Everyone was involved in the creative process behind this commercials, which is always good.
Finally, we got to this Mother that we all came to love, we called her “Karina”, and she was our first of many Mamá Luchettis!
These were our final designs:
       
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