In week 5 we studied Character design. Character design is an essential part of bringing life to a story/scene. ‘Character is what drives the story and breathes life into a film’ – Pixar. There are many character design steps that will help develop your character in the best possible way, such as:
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- Figure out your target audience
- study other designs
- make your character unique – body shape, face shape
- add personality
- add exaggeration
- give your character a background, goals, dreams, wants
- research real subjects etc. props, clothing, species
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When it comes to creating your character there are initial considerations you can take to improve your work. These are:
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- Silhouette – is the characters shape distinguishable
- Shape – round, square, triangular
- Appeal – what feature is most appealing – hair, eyes, shape
- Structure – head, chest, torso, limbs
- Animate-ability – is it simple enough to animate?
- Colour – palettes/colour schemes
- Variation – in multiple character designing
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Character design is very important in animation as characters are a main part of any story. Characters can carry the story from the start right to the end. I completed a quick exercise on character design and drawing from real subjects.
Source: Week 5, Lecture video and slides, Character design Intro video.mp4/Character design lecture part 2.mp4
In the video, Character design lecture part 2, I tried out the experiment Aodhan had did himself where he found images of celebrities or known people and took 20 minutes of each person to draw them out in a cartoonish, exaggerated style. This took a while for me to get used to but I pulled through and drew three of my favourite artists. Reference Image Below.
As I were drawing these, I tried to find the overall emotion or personality from each artist. This helped me to make their personality and emotion more visual and exaggerated.