Month: March 2022

Character design for working with Year 2

It is a really great opportunity to work with second-year students, I was assigned to help Penny with the design of a female character. There are only two shots (a back and a close-up of the front) of the entire character appearing.

Two shots from Penny’ storyboard

Penny showed me the storyboard she had drawn and explained to me the role and personality of the character throughout the animation, as well as some of the Moodboards she had found. I quickly got an idea of what the character needed to look like as Penny was very thorough with the information she gave me. I spent the day drawing the general outline and facial expressions of the character, and as the character was set in the year 1948, I also drew two hairstyles for her to choose from.

Character design for Cat lady

The only thing Penny pointed out to me was that she wanted the character’s eyes to have a more cat-like outline so that they would relate better to the story. So I changed the eyes and set the overall tone and then started to animate the character.

Add cat-like eyes

Penny gave me an animation reference video which made it very easy for me to understand the mood Penny wanted. I sent Penny a few keyframes of my drawing, and Penny was very positive about the rough drawing and wanted me to continue to refine it.

I think this cooperation was a success except for the fact that I ended up using more time for keyframe drawing because the class and the homework took up most of my time, but I didn’t have time to refine it, and my quick grasp of the character’s dynamics was still lacking, I think this needs a lot of drawing practice in the future to further improve my drawing speed.

For this project, I worked on the character design and a small part of the rough animation. I think this experience has helped me to understand other people’s ideas quickly in the workplace and I have learnt that communication is a very important and crucial step, as it can save a lot of time in a project.

I think the challenge I had from this experience was the keyframing, which required me to add some personal emotion to the character and how the character should be represented in just a few seconds, Steve had said in class that even a simple push on the door should have an animated character’s own way of expression. I thought that by refining the character’s eyes, a backward glance would be more effective in adding a sense of mystery to the woman, which it does. I found that if I added more vivid character expressions to the character, it would bring tension to the animation and convey the character’s personality better.

Thoughts from the storytelling class

Usually, a good animation that catches the eye and is remembered by the viewer has one thing in common: a strong plot twist, that is to say, a plot that surprises the viewer, both in terms of plot and characterisation, and that will be remembered by the viewer in a short time. If the narrative is bland, the audience will not remember it, no matter how beautiful and rich the images are.

In class, teacher Lucy Lii analysed several common characterisations and asked us to make connections, for example a character who is a mother but a demon at the same time would give the whole story a sense of mystery and make you feel connected to the character.

I have compiled a few of the characters that my teacher mentioned in class, and they are:

  • Maiden
  • Monarch
  • Mother
  • Child
  • The Hero
  • The Devil
  • Trickster

And when creating a character, try asking these questions:

  1. Where do they feel safe?
  2. What are they scared of?
  3. What do they want?
  4. What other archetype do they like?
  5. Who do they dislike?
  6. What do they find easy?
  7. What do they find hard?

I found that by answering these questions, a complete characterisation emerged clearly, with each character having their own ideas and distinct personalities, and so that later in the scripting, each character had their own framework, which prevented the ideas from running out of steam and avoided situations that did not fit the character’s own personality.

This storytelling lesson today has been very insightful for me. Every time I watch a film I analyse the qualities of the characters that are particularly memorable, and you will find that almost every film you can see on the market has these characteristics, and I think this will be very helpful for me in creating stories in the future, mastering these methods to catch the audience’s eye more quickly and create more interesting animations.