luca muscia design

The Gecko

Idea Conception & Storyboarding

‘The Gecko’ began as a modelling challenge for myself, back in August of 2023. I wanted to design and create a character, paying attention to good topology and style. I had created characters before, for previous projects, but they were always quick and dirty, and I wanted to challenge my attention to detail.

Having designed the character of the Gecko, I started imagining what story could be told with my little character. I storyboarded a rough idea which ended up being the direction I went in for ‘The Gecko’.

Prop & Set Design

This is the football that features heavily in the film. I textured it with a mixture of handmade dirt and clay shaders. One of the first directions I was going to go in with this project was a claymation, stop-motion style and this clay shader is a holdover from that stage of development.

The shoe prop was really fun to make! I ended up going for a stylised cartoony look, inspired by Pixar-like proportions.

The idea I had in mind for the set was an overgrown football pitch, perhaps on the outskirts of the city, in a warm and tropical country. I created the fence using geometry nodes in Blender, added a displacement texture to the ground to introduce some height variation, and modelled the football net by hand. The grass is a particle system and the trees are cards faced towards the camera.