Reasons for choosing:

Human

There are very few species that walk on 2 feet and if they do they are usually artificial like a robot or they will eventually drop back down to 4 feet like a monkey. We are the only natural species that always walk on 2 legs.  I want the human to be heroic but

 I am not yet sure exactly why I am pursuing this

I could have made a heroic dog but it would have looked strange with wings and you can’t really tell if an animal is good or bad just by looking at it. You can tell much more with a human. You can see it in all sorts of ways with a human but more than with any other species you can tell it through facial expressions alone. Humans allow for a wider variety of facial expressions than any other living species.

Dog

I have always owned and liked dogs. When thinking of a quadruped I would naturally think of a dog over any other animal. If I’m going to add emotion to the animation then having had a dog around for most of my life would really help. I will still need research and references but I have a built in understanding of the emotional life of dogs. I then however want to make this dog evil so that there is a clear contrast between the human and the dog. A dog is said to be ‘man’s best friend’ so to have a complete difference between one and the other is interesting.

Often when you see a new film or programme the bad guy has an evil dog- Cerberus guarding hell (although there is a contrast in the Harry potter film where the dog is a guard dog but with a gentler nature). If I create a sort of Cerberus I will be able to give each head a different personality- I could pick 3 of the 7 dwarves, using them to refer to different types of personality. The serious one could be the middle one- I’m not sure why? He would look down on the other 2- he would be the ‘top’ head. Another would be sleeping; another would have its eyes swirling around…

Owl

I chose to do a snowy owl or an owl in general because they are very different from the birds I was looking at. The sparrow was a bit too small for what I wanted to make. The eagle was huge and seemed to not have any unique aspects to it. Owls seem to move and act in different ways. The snowy owl and the barn owl seem to have

a really unique movement and different feather patterns.

Hammerhead shark

The hammerhead has an aggressive movement style compared to other sharks. And it has a unique and stands out head, which could be a bit more challenging to model. A hammerhead is the type of shark that needs to swim to breathe and if it stops it’s dead so its movements are essential to its life. Because of the shape of its head it doesn’t need big dorsal fins at the back for movement; it uses its head as one big fin. This also affects its movement.