I won the Design Your Own Nightmare Before Christmas Character contest

Dec-1-06, 2:18 pm by Hanford
File under: Misc., Photoshop, Disney

Nightmare before xmas characters

I saw the "Design your own Nightmare Before Christmas character" contest listed on the The Disney Blog and decided to enter it because I enjoy creative contests where they just don't pick a winner at random. I thought the video from Tim Burton would be a pretty cool prize.

I spent about 2 hours designing a headless character, but I was wondered if it invoked Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow movie more than Nightmare before Christmas, so I scrapped it. In thinking about what would be more in spirit with the movie, I came up with the idea of playing off of the 3d aspect of the re-release. Soon I had the idea to combine two one-eye'd heads onto a single body.

I thought about designing a character totally from scratch, but I read the rules and saw that they required at least one of the supplied body parts to qualify. I used the contest's "avatar creation tool" to save out the body parts individually so that I had more control over them in Photoshop. I noticed that the mummy head already had one eye, so I went with it. For the other head, I played around with a pirate-like eye patch, and a hollow eye socket, before coming up with the "scarecrow" style patch over the eye that I went with.

In order to make the gag more obvious, I whipped up some 3d glasses in their hands. I knew that the movie was not done is red/blue 3d, but they really say "3d" to me. I also added the extra body parts and the hacksaw to the background to further the concept. I used the Hue/Saturation tool in Photoshop to change the color of the suit. I created the wall paper from scratch so that the frame didn't look like it was just hanging in mid-air.

Finally, to make the gag as obvious as possible, I wrote a little rhyme to title it with. I chose "mumrags" as the mummy's name so it was clear as to which head it was. When I submitted the image it asked me for a description, so I whipped up a slightly longer variation on the rhyme, which I'll try to post here if I can find it.

I did the character on October 31st in about 3 hours, and submitted it just minutes before leaving for a Halloween party at Forbidden Island. I had a lot of fun working on it and seeing what I could come up with. It's cool to have the Tim Burton video, even if it is a bit unspecific -- I wonder how many people are going to put it on their page -- but overall I'm just excited to win.

From the looks of the backdrop it seems Tim Burton filmed it at a Sears photo center. Heh. The video is on my Myspace page.

Okay, I need to get back to working on my new video games.

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Justin wrote: Jan-9-07, 6:59 am

Great news buddy! You rock!

MrBaliHai wrote: Dec-10-06, 12:18 pm

Very clever! I'm not surprised that you won.

Gadisa wrote: Dec-6-06, 10:52 am

wow congrats!!
it looks amazing!

Chuck wrote: Dec-2-06, 8:38 am

Hey, that's pretty cool! Great concept. Congrats!

Greg wrote: Dec-1-06, 5:36 pm

Wow- congratulations. I notice Tim never says, "Congratulations _HANFORD_." I wonder how many months ago he actually filmed that vid.

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