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King
Mathias
Character Sketch
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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The
Kingdom of Morcia
Knights Kingdom™ and associated images and characters Copyright
LEGO ©2003-2006 |
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One of my big jobs on
the Knights Kingdom™ team in 2004 was developing the look and
feel of the Knights universe, to give direction to the teams handling
promotional materials (like the Knights website)
and licensed products (like the storybooks and video
games). Everybody had different ideas about what Knights was
going to be, and it took a lot of work (and hundreds of sketches)
to come to a unified world style. The most important factors were
that the world have a LEGO "feel," which took the form
of bulky and simplified geometries, broad patches of flat color
shapes, and an ubiquitous spirit of optimism. It also had to be
strongly medieval but with a fantasy modernist twist, in the spirit
of solid eighties cartoons like He-Man and the Thundercats. And
lastly it was important that the land be untamed and mysterious,
so thick mists and jagged landscape formations that can only be
described as "extremely improbable" became the order of
the day.
The image of Morcia, above, is unquestionably the most frequently
re-used of all the early development sketchwork, in one form or
another, although the original version used the Lion-headed
Castle of Morcia - the set was still being designed. This scene
was repainted dark and red to show Morcia under Vladek's rule, it's
been squeezed into sphere shape for viewing by crystal ball, it's
been overrun by waves of dark magic in the magazine comics, and
pasted into the trading cards, comics, website, storybooks, and
who knows where else. Not bad for a simple development piece!
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Architecture
Sketches
Form Development
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Detail:
the Grand Tournament Arena
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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The real driving factor
behind Morcian architecture design is that it had to look like it
could be built out of Lego, and that it hinted at enough cool Lego-type
functions that kids might actually want to try. The Grand
Tournament Arena, as pictured here and shown in more detail later
in the LEGO comics, had a number of moving and turning sections that
allowed it to be configured for the different tournament events.
If you look at the buildings surrounding the Arena, you can see the
skewed geometric forms of Morcian-style architecture as practiced
in the kingdom's capital.
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Sketches: The
Citadel
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The
Guardian
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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The
Citadel
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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The Guardian waits at the Citadel of Orlan to
test the heroes before giving them the Heart of the Shield. The Guardian
hearkens from an earlier age, kept alive by the magic of the Citadel
to defend the Heart from the unworthy, so I got to make his armor
much more traditional and old-fashioned, although still with visible
precursors to the style of the hero knights' armor that was developed
decades or centuries later. The Heart of the Shield is a circular
casing with a five-pointed spiral opening; that's the motif you see
everywhere on the Guardian's outfit.
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Sketches:
The Quest
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The
Shadow Knight
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Border
Ambush
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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One of the high points of
the heroes' quest is the crossing of the rickety rope bridge that
gives access over the cliffs surrounding the Citadel. This is the
site of LEGO's set 8778:
Border Ambush, in which an evil Shadow Knight lies in wait to
attack when the heroes attempt to cross.
The Shadow Knight as shown in this character sketch was originally
created as Vladek's solitary evil henchman, a fallen knight who resorted
to sabotage and guile to defeat his more honorable foes. Although
the helmet and axe were kept mostly the same, the Shadow Knight character
was changed drastically for the final version of the story - now the
Shadow Knights were Vladek's mass-produced and mind-controlled army.
Interestingly enough, the Shadow Knight's original character and story
did finally make it into the Knights story in 2006, but as a Rogue
Knight instead: Karzon,
Knight of the Serpent.
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Animal Castle
Development: Santis's Bear Castle
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Bear
Castle Sketches
Architecture Style / Environment
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Bear
Castle Sketches
Bear characterization
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Bear
Castle Sketch
Color Rendering
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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The original plan for Knights'
Kingdom was that all of the knights lived in castles shaped like the
animals of their heraldry, although we shifted away from that idea
by the time the products came out (see the Castle
of Morcia Concept page to see the difference between the early
animal-based style and the style of the final product). We hadn't
yet made revised images for the heroes' castles when the Knights website
went live, so these development images ended up being released as
the heroes' official castles for the first couple of months of 2004.
The website images were replaced later when we painted new versions
of the castles for the 2004 trading cards. The new castles are no
longer animal-themed, although you can still see tiny miniature versions
of the animal castles on the map in the Book
of Morcia if you look closely.
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Bear
Castle Environment Mockup 1
Frigid Alpine Environment
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Bear
Castle Environment Mockup 2
Rugged Rocky Environment
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Work on the story world,
visual design, and products were all underway at the same time, so
the different development teams were always affecting each other and
building off of each other's ideas. As a side effect, it meant that
I was making lots of changes to the visual guides in a hurry. The
castle environment shots were photoshop hacks made from chopped-up
bits of photo stock, stitched together and painted over in a hurry
every time we needed to try out a different feel.
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Bear
Castle Environment Mockup 3
Rugged Grassy Environment
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Bear
Castle Environment Mockup detail
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Santis' bear-themed castle originally sat high up in the frigid moutains
that separated Morcia from the dangerous Wastelands. Then it was decided
that the mountains weren't so much frozen as barren and rugged, and
that the castle defended the only narrow pass into the Wastelands.
Then the story shifted a little further, and the lands were still
rugged but no longer barren, and Santis himself had switched to red
armor instead of gray, so the castle needed to be repainted to match.
This was the final
version of this painting. By the time we painted the new version for
the trading cards, the story had changed again, and now Santis's Orkosan
province was a farmland region of fertile lowland valleys. We kept
the design of the squat Orkosan houses the same, however, and they
seemed to fit just as well in the farmland setting as in this chillier
one.
Animal Castle
Development: The Other Heroes
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Wolf
Castle Sketches
Wolf characterization
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Wolf
Castle Sketch
Color Rendering
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Wolf
Castle Environment
Mockup
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Hawk
Castle Sketches
Architecture Style / Environment
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Hawk
Castle Sketches
Hawk characterization
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Hawk
Castle Environment
Mockup
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Ape
Castle Sketches
Architecture Style / Environment
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Ape
Castle Sketches
Ape characterization
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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Ape
Castle Environment
Mockup
Copyright LEGO ©2003 |
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