Week 5: Character Design. – Nicolle’s Animation Blog

For week 5 we were to create characters that would invest the audience in the story we were going to tell. Characters are what make up a story so I want to invest story telling elements into my character designs to inflict appropriate emotions onto the viewer. I needed to try and understand the story I wanted to tell and how my characters come into play, so I needed to be mindful of the following design steps: target audience, where the character appears, other existing designs, character uniqueness, personality, utilizing exaggeration and strategic colour etc. There is also the matter of us needing to animate this character, so we need to keep our designs simple enough so the overall group are able to translate the designs over into their own style.

NOTE, things to consider when making a character or “Initial Creative Considerations”, taken from PowerPoint. I want to document and reflect over these when making my character designs: Silhouette (interesting shapes and turn into character after), Shape (define and break up a body shape- enhances personality), Appeal (Invest in character, appealing to the character), Structure (Joints, animatable friendly. Solid characters, any lacking structure loses believability), Animate-Ability, Colour and Variation (tell their personality apart, poses, head shape, complexity.

Class activity:

We were tasked to create drawings based on blobbed silhouettes. I liked this exercise as I just drew whatever came to mind and tested myself to fill all the blobs to generate recognisable forms. I’m surprised I was able to fill in various subjects since I almost kept thinking they all looked the same, but this comes into the importance of silhouette’s and the shape that you give an object. It was difficult trying to not alter the shape to the details I wanted to include but the constrictions let me more creative in what I needed to outline.

For our second exercise we were to take established public figures and turn them into our own stylized caricatures. This was to reflect back on exaggerating human proportions to form character and personality, breaking down a person to basic shapes. I made sure to keep referring back to my reference to capture the characteristics of each individual.

This is the result of the task:

HOMEWORK:

The exercises from the class made me reflect back on differing character silhouettes. Before delving into my own character creation I wanted to study other well known characters silhouette’s and take what I know of said character to establish the reason why they’re designed that way, to fit the narrative function of the show and how this successfully comes across to the audience.