Siew Li and Ah Fai
Production Blog/Site for Siew Li and Ah Fai, an animated third-year thesis film
created by Low Hui Li and Theresa Cheong
AH FAI
FINAL DESIGN
Ah F.A.I (Friendly Artificial Intelligence) is an 'old-model' cleaning robot with a child-like personality, eager to please Siew Li despite his poor cleaning capabilities.
As the story focuses on Ah F.A.I, we made him more appealing by making him round and bubbly in contrast to the harder edges in Siew Li's. His oversized head and small body accentuate his child-like personality. His odd quirk is his twitchy antenna, which also reacts according to his emotions.
As we were developing the final design, we experimented with giving Ah F.A.I a variety of arms made of different materials. These designs helped to influence how Ah F.A.I would be restricted function-wise in the story, giving him (and indirectly Siew Li) an obstacle.
Ultimately, we used two designs in the story, with the main design being the metallic tripod arms (which restricts him from carrying heavy boxes easily).
In the color tests, we tried using darker/less saturated colours with a reddish hue (which resembles rust to emphasise its origin of used machine parts), and bright color palettes (inspired by Japanese cleaning appliances).
In the end, we used the white/light blue/grey palette (bottom: top left image) as it was easily associated with cleaning appliances, and also highlighted Ah F.A.I's simple and innocent personality.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
In the inital concept, Ah F.A.I was meant to be a robot created from scratch by Siew Li. We referenced the sleek design of Japanese robots, as well as robots made from junk materials, and mixed elements of both.
Through feedback given, we tweaked the body proportion of the robot to create a child-like image to add a clear body contrast between Ah F.A.I (with an oversized head and small body) and Siew Li (smaller head with bulky body).
References
Early in the conceptualisation stage, we referenced robots designed with makeshift/junk materials for Ah FAI's junk material origins as well as modern cleaning robots for Ah FAI's later transformation.
