My 30 second animation is going to be about trans equality/discrimination. The animation will be about a trans guy being physically assaulted by strangers in black and white before a bystander in colour shouts ‘hey’ and scares the assailants off before helping the trans guy up. As the bystander helps the trans guy up, colour returns to him. The bystander lifts and dusts off his trans flag and ties it around his neck like a cape. The screen then goes black and texts appears reading, “Everyone is deserving of love”.

With the start of any new animation project, one of the first things to do, after coming up with the idea/storyline, is to develop the characters that will lead your animation along. Below is the beginning sketches and rough colour of some character ideas.

Trans guy ideas:

I started by roughly sketching out a couple possible male faces for the trans character. I then cleaned up the sketch so they were a bit more clear before roughly colouring them in to get an idea of how they’d look. I made a point of trying to make each possibility as different and unique as possible. Having the possibilities all varied also shows off the fact that there’s no one way for a trans guy to look.

Female character ideas:

I made the female character ideas the same way I made the trans guy ones; by starting with a rough sketch, cleaning up said sketch the roughly colouring them in. I tried to make the female character ideas just as varied and different as well so there was a wide variety of possibilities. Although I had intended for this second character to be female, the middle possibility looks more boyish and could be gender non conforming like myself which could also work within the animation.

Scene practice:

With the animation already in mind, I decided it would be best to try and test out how the environment in one of the scenes might look beforehand instead of completely freehanding it when it comes to the actual animation. Doing so allows me to see if the environment I have in mind will actually be possible to make within the animation. I’m not that great at perspective either but I think this environment turned out fairly well so thankfully I think it will work fine in my animation. I kept it as a clean sketch as I didn’t want to spend too much time on it.

Trans guy chibi fullbodies:

I figured, before I settle on which character idea to use, it might be a good idea to draw up some simple fullbodies of the possibilities to get an idea of what each character might wear within the animation. Similar to how I drew the headshots, I started off with a rough base before going over it with a cleaner sketch of the character before roughly colouring them in. This was my first time properly drawing chibis as well but I think they all turned out pretty well, I tried to make their outfits as different as I could. I will do a more anatomically correct and more detailed fullbody once I decide on which character I’ll use for my animation.

Female character chibi fullbodies:

As with the trans guy chibi ideas, I decided to make some for the other female character that will be in my animation. I used the same rough chibi base that I used for the trans guy chibis in order to try and keep some consistency with the style of them all. I think these chibis turned out pretty well too and, similar with the trans guy designs, I tried to vary their outfits as much as I could.