The Evolution of James Dashiell

Here's a partial turn-around of James Dashiell, the main character in "The Case of the Midnight Murderer."

I refined the character a bit more as I got him Flash/animation ready but this is more or less the final design.  Dash is a private dick, he's new to the game and doesn't really know his way around a magnifying glass yet.  He spends a lot of time trying to act tougher and cooler than he really is, spouting out hokey lines of gibberish that probably sound quite eloquent and profound in his head.  His posture in the turn-around is somewhere in between his cocky showmanship and his less self confident true self.  This isn't always how he looked though.  Here's the first drawing I have of him from back when I was like 14...

GAH!!!!  That's horrible!  His feet looks like hooves and I can only assume his shins were broken for some reason.  Maybe he welched on a gambling debt that I forgot to write about.  "The Case of the Midnight Murderer," was a short story I wrote in highschool...I actually wrote a series of them but Midnight Murderer was the only one that's still any good.  It wasn't until several years later that I thought there might be potential in adapting it into a movie.  That's when I drew this next incarnation.

This is a much better drawing but at this point I hadn't even written the script yet and was still deciding on the approach I wanted to take with the whole thing.  I ultimately decided I wanted it to fall somewhere between this more cartoony version and a more comic bookish type of style that would fit into the stark film noir shadows I wanted to populate the movie with.  Here's some sketches from his development into the movie version.

Every character in the film is in some way modeled physically on an actor from the 40's.  I essentially cast the movie like I was a 1940's movie mogul who could afford any actor he wanted.  The end result of each character doesn't necessarily resemble the actor that much though.  It was just a jumping off point to get me started and in the end all that mattered was that I liked the look of the character.  Dash sort of fell through the cracks though in that way.  He tries to act like Humphrey Bogart but he's not very good at it, he's a lot younger than Bogie was in these movies and should maybe even look a little baby faced.  I looked a lot at Dick Powell...he was also too old but he was as much known for playing hard broiled gumshoes as he was singing and dancing in musicals, so he had the goofball quality to counter balance the tough guy.  In the end, Dash looks like a vague amalgam of Powell and Bogart who's had a face lift to look several years younger.  I'm also told he looks a bit like me and I can't fully argue that.  Here're some early drawings of his outfits...I don't know why I drew his legs so long in these.

I have a lot more clothing sketches.  I watched a lot of old movies with a clipboard in hand and just drew stuff that I thought looked cool, so a lot of Dash's earlier outfits are mixed in with everyone else.  His trenchcoat is based pretty closely on Bogie's coat in Casablanca.  It had a lot of layers and flaps and stuff which I thought made it a lot more interesting than most of the other coats I looked at in my research.  He wears that coat for the lion's share of the movie so I thought it better look interesting.  Here's some really bad drawings I did for a quick and dirty colour test.

The movie was always intended to be in black and white but I wanted to have some idea of colour early on to help in defining the gray tones.  I literally just scribbled down the line work with a Uniball and did some quick pencil crayon colouring.  Next up we've got some action poses!

Nothing much to say about these really...just an opportunity to make sure he'd look good doing the stuff he needed to do.  Down below is one of many fully rendered pencil concept drawings.  I just posted a whole whack of concept art over on the "The Case of the Midnight Murderer" Facebook page.  If you haven't already liked that page I recommend you do...I post stuff like this on there once in a while that I won't necessarily post anywhere else and with any luck I'll also have updates on festivals and opportunities to see the film in the coming months.