How I Redesigned Jazz (18:36)
Some key things I kept in mind about Jazz was that he is in several iterations: upbeat, acrobatic, pretty chill, pretty cool, outgoing, pretty much into Earth culture, loves their music, shows and incorporates Earth slang noticeably AAVE and pretty stylish.
The vehicle I chose for Jazz was meant to closely resemble his G1 Porsche, but with less intricate designs and more solid colored patterns. Though I did retain the original white colors I added a dark blue section on the back third of the vehicle accompanied with a dark blue and red stripe on the hood and roof of the car with a white Autobot Insignia on the roof.
When it came to Jazz's color choice I stuck with the primary white color and to reduce the amount of prominent colors on the design I combined the black and blue color from his G1 one counterpart and used a dark blue color instead complimented by a red stripe. I also put in yellow plates, though something I noticed in some of my animations is that they come out as mostly white instead due to the 3D scenes lighting. When it came to his body I wanted to give Jazz a bulkier upper body one that could soundly support handstands as well as leaping from those handstands in the context of this iteration of Jazz being talented with acrobatics. I kept the front end of the car on his chest placed his front windshields on his abdomen his wheels found on top of his shoulders and on his calves placed his rear lights on his elbows and for a little pizzazz added spoilers on his forearms and placed the roof of the car on his back along with the car doors.
When it came to his face I wanted to give Jazz a really charming smile with a tooth Gap like a few popular actors in media like Eddie Murphy, Lawrence Fishburn, and Samuel L Jackson over here. Also when I was thinking about tooth gaps I suddenly remembered that scene from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 where Jamie Fox's character Max gets his tooth Gap closed while being changed into Electro I'm not even kidding there is a literal few- second shot showing the tooth Gap closing during the transformation, weird.
To give Jazz a sense of being hip with human culture I also gave him angular glasses which all across media most characters who wear these Shades have this chill demeanor like they're on top of everything and whatever they do they do in style in fact there were at least two characters in Transformers Animated that had these sorts of shades: Prowl and Soundwave, as for these designs on the side of the helmet I made these in reference to his relative higher ranking amongst the Autobots as Optimus's first lieutenant.