Buzz – Slurp

I began this project with a simple question in mind, how could I simulate a living creature? I thought about making something that would expand and deflate to simulate breathing. The simplest thing was to plug some eyes onto a shape, as Golan pointed out to me.By making it blink once in a while, the object becomes alive. My thoughts wandered and eventually landed on food. Creatures all need to eat right? So I started to formulate a critter that would devour another critter. I wanted to make something approachable, entertaining, and different from my previous projects.

After some quick sketches, I decided to create a baby chameleon-like creature, named Camel.

I wanted to give my creature an environment where he could live, but it would have to be contained enough so he wouldn’t escape. The first thought that came into mind was just to make a simple boxed out area on the canvas so he wouldn’t be able to step out of the border. Simple enough right? However, I felt like that didn’t depict the life of a chameleon. A chameleon is a slow careful creature that spends most of its life up in the tree tops, catching bugs. I thought that this type easy-going lifestyle needed a fluid shape that would represent something soft, without extreme changes.

Furthermore, I wanted to describe a cycle in life. When the fly would buzz around the chameleon, within a certain range of Camel’s vision, he would reach out for the fly with his tongue. But Camel is still a baby, so sometimes the fly would get away when it twitches violently enough. The viewer can also chose to help out Camel catch the fly. The fly naturally wants to run away from anything coming towards it, so if you push scare it in the right direction, Camel will be able to eat it.