Animation and Design

After reading this terms project brief in class, my first thought was that it seemed like a good place to start - character design, learning an important part of the process of pre-production. It sounded fun. Then we were presented with 3 envelopes titled 'Film', 'Games' and 'TV'. Naturally I went for the film envelope, and on reading the contents inside I found the character I am to design is a monster called Humbaba (or Huwawa) who appears in the story "The Epic of Gilgamesh".

This appealed to me instantly as I find mythology and fantasy very interesting, though I know nothing of history, so I will need to do plenty of research on the time period and such. He will probably be a challenging character to design due to the mixture of human and animal features.

The first research I did was to read through the page I was linked to in the project description: http://www.math.uic.edu/~ronan/Gilgamesh

"they will undertake an epic journey to the great cedar forest where they will challenge Humbaba, the guardian placed there by the god Enlil."

It seems that Humbaba has a relatively minor part in the Epic, and very little was written about him on this page. Apart from the quote above, the only other thing it says about him is that he is terrifying, and that he has seven "auras".

I suspected my mum would have a copy of the book, so I called her up. She did have one, and so I borrowed it with the intention of reading the whole thing - however I found the language was hard to understand, and so i skipped ahead to the chapter involving Humbaba in both versions of the story - which are quite different, but both end up with poor Humbaba dead.

Unfortunately, there was not much description of Humbaba's appearance in the book. He is at one point described as an ogre, later it is said that he has tusks, the eyes and paws of a lion, and eagles talons. Curiously, it is also suggested that he has both big AND little feet. I'm not entirely sure how this is possible. At first I thought it may be because he is quadrapedal, like a lion, but on viewing the couple of illustrations of him in the book, he is depicted looking much more like a man than a beast. He is also depicted with a big, curly beard.

I then visited the Babylonian section of the British Museum hoping I might find some art of the character there, but sadly, no luck. What I did learn of the time period there is that there is a lot of use of gold and vibrant blues and reds, particularly on things like jewellery. A lot of their art contains animals such as lions and oxes, and the men are always drawn with big, curly beards - the same as the illustrations I had already seen in the book.