What’s the difference a year make is more obvious when we are young. Each year is an event to be remembered like birthdays and new year. Being twelve or thirteen. Then later it is sixteen and seventeen. We were so eager to grow older but never realized that every age that passed will never return.
In developing the character for the boy hero Kalifa I am quiet adamant about his age. He should be around ten years old who is still very much preoccupied with games and day dreaming. The previous design of him seems a bit older for what I had in mind. As I had mentioned a year or two make an obvious difference in a child’s life.
After designing Kamila I managed to find a proper base model that has the right height and a face that I could morph into the Kalifa that I want at a cost of dumping my previous design that was tedious. As many other creative efforts that ended up in a trash bin not because they are bad but they didn’t fit right into the whole picture.
As a peasant boy Kalifa’s outfit shouldn’t be elaborate. Despite that guideline Kalifa’s outfit took longer to design and finalized. The most difficult thing to achieve in design is simplicity. But in a noir world even simple forms will look interesting because of the highlights and shadows. In addition to that the dynamic cloth simulation is getting better. Not because of its complexity but its realism. The emphasis of Palestine 3000 A.D. is not of its fantasy but its realism. For realism will make people realize.
Kalifa is just a simple peasant boy who didn’t have any ambition to be a warrior like the eager young Luke Skywalker of Star Wars. Like many other Palestinian boys he is forced in a situation that he has to fight. Unlike most Western presumption that Palestinian kids are groomed to be terrorists. If you are a friend of the Zionists who are robbers and killers using God as a lame excuse then you will not see the hero in this boy named Kalifa. Will you be forever blind?
