CGNetworks Feature :: Reader Project
Making Dr. Maxwell
Jaime Maestro, Jonatan Catalán and Alex Mateo, Keytoon, 10 December 2004

The Keytoon team describes how, inspired by Pixar and every mad scientist who lived to continue the stereotype, they created the 3D character ‘Dr. Maxwell’.

Concept

We had been thinking for some time about a character who creates strange inventions, for use it for a series of shorts where he would invent new machines. In fact, it's an idea which we're still developing. We even have some scripts prepared already – about very funny inventions.

We thought that it would be a cool idea to make Dr. Maxwell be an eccentric professor in a university teaching atomic fusion or some such ‘mad scientist' topic. The imagery would depict sample scenes from one of his absurd classes.

It's important not only to think about the image of your character itself, but to create around it a complete environment, personality, hobbies, and life history. The more detailed these aspects, the easier it will be for the audience to believe its existence, and the easier it will be for us when animating. Of course we did not create an entire genealogical tree for the Doc, but we discussed his personality, his lifestyle, his hobbies, etc. This way we knew how he would react to different situations.

References

Pixar's short film Geri's game

When we started designing Dr. Maxwell, we had in our minds lots of characters – old men or crazy scientists – who we admired, like Mutenroushi (Dragon Ball), Geri (Pixar's Geri's Game), and Doc (Back to the Future). We knew it would be difficult to create a crazy scientist that wouldn't relate too obviously to other similar characters. Besides the personal style of Jaime (TACK), there's a mix of two styles that we are passionate about and wanted to use: Manga and ‘Pixar' – simple but clear volumes and only the necessary details. We can't forget that when we are creating a character for animation, the more detail you put in, the harder gets to animate it later on.

We try with many configurations of hair, with a great moustache, with large beard, with long hair, without hair… Eventually we end up choosing to make him bald with a bit of hair over his ears, and as he's very absent-minded we added a little 3 or 4-day beard.

Something that we knew clearly from the beginning was that the scientist would have big rounded glasses, with a strong refraction that deforms his tiny eyes. Although this hides his eyes somehow, we felt like experimenting with the possibilities that could give these deformations.