5D: Dreamworks Animation - CG Character Creation – Emergent Design Paradigms from Dave Blass on Vimeo.
1: Research and evaluate
It can be helpful to try and deconstruct why certain characters and their characteristics work and why some don’t. There’s no shortage of research material to be found, with illustrated characters appearing everywhere: on TV commercials, cereal boxes, shop signs, stickers on fruit, animations on mobile phones, and more. Study these characters and think about what makes some successful and what in particular you like about them.
2: Design and plan
Where will the character be seen and in what medium? This will have a direct bearing on how you go about your design. For example, if the character is for a mobile-phone screen, there’s no point designing it to have a lot of intricate details and features. Nathan Jurevicius says, regardless of the format, “The process of thinking up concepts always starts the same: paper, pencil, green tea... lots of thumbnails, written ideas, scratches and sketches over sketches.”
3: Who is it aimed at?
Think about your audience. Characters aimed at young children, for example, are typically designed around basic shapes and bright colours. If you’re working for a client, the character’s target audience is usually predetermined, as Nathan Jurevicius explains: “Commissioned characters are usually more restrictive but no less creative. Clients have specific needs but also want me to do my ‘thing’. Usually, I’ll break down the core features and personality. For example, if the eyes are important then I’ll focus the whole design around the face, making this the key feature that stands out.”
4: Visual impact
Whether you’re creating a monkey, robot or monster, you can guarantee there are going to be a hundred other similar creations out there. Your character needs to be strong and interesting in a visual sense to get people’s attention. When devising The Simpsons, Matt Groening knew he had to offer the viewers something different. He reckoned that when viewers were flicking through TV channels and came across the show, the characters’ unusually bright yellow skin colour would grab their attention.
5: Line qualities and styles
The drawn lines of which your character is composed can go some way to describing it. Thick, even, soft and round lines may suggest an approachable, cute character, whereas sharp, scratchy and uneven lines might point to an uneasy and erratic character. Sune Ehlers characters are bold and seem to dance on the page, which echoes his approach to drawing them. He explains: “Drawing a doodle is about decisive pen-manoeuvring. A strong line for me comes from strength and rhythm.”
6: Exaggerated characteristics
Exaggerating the defining features of your character will help it appear larger than life. Exaggerated features will also help viewers to identif y the character’s key qualities. Exaggeration is key in cartoon caricatures and helps emphasise certain personality traits. If your character is strong, don’t just give it normal-sized bulging arms, soup them up so that they’re five times as big as they should be!
7: Colour me bad
Colours can help communicate a character’s personality. Typically, dark colours such as black, purples and greys depict baddies with malevolent intentions. Light colours such as white, blues, pinks and yellows express innocence, good and purity. Comic-book reds, yellows and blues might go some way to giving hero qualities to a character.
8: Adding accessories
Props and clothing can help to emphasise character traits and their background. For example, scruffy clothes can be used for poor characters, and lots of diamonds and bling for tasteless rich ones. Accessories can also be more literal extensions of your character’s personality, such as a parrot on a pirate’s shoulder or a maggot in a ghoul’s skull.
9: The third dimension
Depending on what you have planned for your character, you might need to work out what it will look like from all angles. A seemingly flat character can take on a whole new persona when seen from the side if, for example, it has a massive beer belly. If your character is going to exist within a 3D world, as an animation or even as a toy, working out its height, weight and physical shape is all important.
10: Conveying personality
Interesting looks alone do not necessarily make for a good character; its personality is key as well. A character’s personality can be revealed through comic strips and animations, where we see how it reacts to certain situations. The personality of your character doesn’t have to be particularly agreeable, but it does need to be interesting (unless your characters is purposely dull). Personality can also be expressed simply in how the character has been drawn.
11: Express yourself
Expressions showing a character’s range of emotions and depicting its ups and downs will further flesh out your character. Depending on its personality, a figure’s emotions might be muted and wry or explosive and wildly exaggerated. Classic examples of this can be found in the work of the legendary Tex Avery: the eyes of his Wild Wolf character often pop out of its head when it’s excited. Another example of how expressions communicate motions is deadpan Droopy, who barely registers any sort of emotion at all.
12: Goals and dreams
The driving force behind a character’s personality is what it wants to achieve. This missing ‘something’ – be it riches, a girlfriend or solving a mystery – can help to create the dramatic thrust behind the stories and adventures your character gets up to. Often the incompleteness or flaws in a character are what make it interesting.
13: Building back stories
If you’re planning for your character to exist within comics and animations then developing its back story is important. Where it comes from, how it came to exist and any life-changing events it has experienced are going to help back up the solidity of, and subsequent belief in, your character. Sometimes the telling of a character’s back story can be more interesting than the character’s present adventures… or not, in the case of the Star Wars prequels.
14: Quick on the draw
Don’t be afraid to experiment and ignore all the rules and tips about planning and crafting the look of your character. Going against what is supposed to be the right way of doing something could create unexpected and exciting results. When artist Yuck creates his characters he doesn’t really know what he’ll draw. “I just listen to music and draw the result dependent on my mood: freaky or cute. I always want to have a drawing that I find interesting. I then work more on the character after it’s okay with me and my brain,” he says.
15: Hone, plan and polish
Instead of just drawing or doodling without too much pre-planning, Nathan Jurevicius prefers to take a different approach. “I take a long time creating finished looking roughs and also thinking about how the character could be expanded beyond a 2D artwork, what the character will do in a specific world, and how it speaks and acts,” he says.
16: Drawn in mud
Having decent materials to work with is useful, but not essential, for the early planning of your character. A lot of amazing characters were successfully designed years ago when no one had personal computers and Photoshop was just a dream. The drawings of your character should still work when rendered on paper with a simple pen or, as Sune Ehlers puts it, “The character should still be able to work with a stick dipped in mud and drawn on asphalt.”
17: Real-world drawing
Ian, of I Like Drawing, generates some of his characters away from both the computer and the sketchbook, allowing outside elements to influence his work. “I really like characters that interact with their surroundings,” he says. “The environment normally suggests an idea and then I let my strange mind do the rest. I prefer drawing in the real world with a pen instead of on the computer, because it feels good and odd things happen.”
18: Release the beast
Show people your creations and ask them what they think. Don’t just ask whether they like them or not. Instead, see if they can pick up the personalities and traits of your characters. Find who you think is the suitable or ideal audience for your work and get feedback specifically from them about it.
19: Beyond the character
In the same way that you create a history for your character, you need to create an environment for it to help further cement believability in your creation. The world in which the character lives and interacts should in some way make sense to who the character is and what it gets up to.
20: Fine-tuning a figure
Question each element of your creation, especially things such as its facial features. The slightest alteration can have a great effect on how your character is perceived. Illustrator Neil McFarland advises: “Think about the meaning of the word ‘character’. You’re supposed to breath life into these things, make them appealing and give them the magic that will allow people to imagine what they’re like to meet and how they might move. I think it’s strange how creating characters for the sake of it has become a distinct branch of graphic design.”
The aim of the module is to produce a substantial *piece of work within a defined specialist area of study.
Pre production for Specialist Study in Level 6
Aims (What is the goal/plan? Or an anticipated outcome?
Video Pitch
self-promotion and specialisation
Character design...In this pitch that I presented I wanted to show knowledge and understanding of a variety of industrial models, practices and processes that takes place in the pre-production phases of animation making.Since characters are the main focus of stories either for animations, games or movies I wanted to explore and focussing on this specific area of pre-production which is character design.
For my 1st semester of the 3rd year I will be looking into character design. My main focus will be to understand the fundamental artistic principles that are often overlook and how to incorporate them.
The uniqueness of a good character design
practical issues and limitations:
precise specifications:
how will the characters be used?
how will the character be displayed?
how close or distant to the camera will the character be?
how big or small is the relative to others characters?
will the character be animated?
how many angles will the the character be viewed from?
how much movement will the character have?
how faster or slow will the character be moving?
will the character be close enough to see facial expressions?
will the character need to speak
how much detail will you need in the hands, feet, hoofs, talons, paws, etc.?
will the characters be simple or complex?
who does the character need to appeal to visually?
can the character stand on its own design if taken out of its environment?
is the character's silhouette or profile readable on its own?
how will the character animate?
There is “something” about their design and their personality that makes us want to know more about them and makes us empathize with their plight. This is called appeal.
In the short, we rarely even know the character’s name. Still, they stick with us for the same reasons. Memorable characters are characters that we care about.
The test of a good character is that he cannot be replaced in the story with someone or something else. Replaceable characters are flat. You can swap them out (a boy for a girl or a squirrel for a squid) and it doesn’t seem to matter to the story; but, when you find the right character, it is difficult to extract him from the story because it is his story.
A story is defined by the character. More specifically, it is defined by how the character reacts to the situation he is in.
Action never just happens. Action is the result of thought and emotion.
This is a golden rule of both literature and film. “Telling” means the use of exposition or description without engaging the emotional or sensory experiences of the character. Showing means to make clearly evident, by the appearance, behavior, action, or reaction, the emo- tional experience of the character.
This giant is not really a design. It is a bunch of stock animation forms put together in proportions that suggest a large character. It is strictly functional for animation.
the animation is wobbly and unstable - unless we use cheats to get from one disconnected mess of details to the next.
There is a reason that classic animation evolved into simple sensible forms. To make something move you have to draw lots and lots of drawings, so you have less time to spend on details.
Chuck Jones has a natural eye for pleasing shapes and forms. He understands construction and in some of his designs, used strong contrasts of forms, shapes and proportions to create animatable, yet distinct and beaitifully balanced and designed characters.
Irv Spence too.
Tom Oreb
Ed Benedict
As I said, many cartoons are designed generically-that is using either non-distinct shapes like circles and ovals, or taking one type of design that might have had some specificity at one time, but after being copied and re-used over and over again has become generic - like the hook nosed mustachioed villain.
Here are a couple model sheets where the characters are still based on classic animation construction, but either the shapes themselves or the details of the features have enough variations to make the characters not look perfectly generic.
Here is a generic character being frightened by a specific character.
You know something about them right away just by how they look. Some designers create purely for aesthetic pleasure, and that has its place too - but not in character-driven cartoons.
5 Originality
It's hard to think of many animated characters that are super original. Most evolve from previous characters. The more distinct they look, the more "original" they are. If they are generic, or they look just like another character you've seen before then they are not very original.
Here are two very distinct characters. I'll try to think of more.
Madame Medusa is pretty distinct, but only one human in history could have animated her! Lots of people have imitated bits of what she looks like and how she moves since.
