Dorothy- Character development

Like i said, Nick and i are responsible for the 3d elements of our project. And we divided them equally between us.
Basically, we have two main 3d characters (The old Dorothy and young Dorothy). And we figured we´d just make one each. Everything from design to finished rig, and then we can all help with the animating.

The Character Design

We were going a bit back and forth about what to make the Dorothys look like. And we settled on the idea of having the old, storytelling one more realistic looking, and the memory version of her, a bit more like a cartoon character.
Because the story revolves around her memory, We wanted to put more focus on the young Dorothy.
We thought a good way to symbolize this would be to have the interview part straight forward without much cameramovement, with an interviewer facing Dorothy, with most of her surroundings literally out of focus and best of all, that you never actually see her eyes to take away some of her personality (we also saw this as a good way to save time modeling, rigging etc).


Young Dorothy

I had some problems trying to figure out the specifics of young Dorothys look, clothes, style, accessories etc...
The only criteria i had in mind was to not make it look like something straight out of a pixar or dreamworks feature.
Oh, and we were thinking about it but decided to stay clear of making her "smokin hot" as we didnt want to direct too much attention at HER, but rather at what she does.
So we started scetching out some ideas.

She was 16 at the time, so we didnt want to make her look TOO cartoony. She needed a little bit of normal proportion to her physique. But we figured her head could still be big and cute.
And a simple ponytail to mininmize animation and rigging never hurts either. But it also works well with the theory that the women in the actual workplace would probably have to put their hair up whilst working.