Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Character Design

Character Design

There are many things you need to think about if you want to design a good successful character. These include; details on the character, backstory, shapes they're going to be, expressions they could have and overall personality and traits you would also like to come across in the look of the design.

The first thing you need to think about when designing is who you want your character to be. A presentation was shown to us by our tutor that really opened my eyes to how much thought goes into each design. Walt disney would say the same as he referred to Mickey Mouse as "Part of the family" when he had designed him because you plan so much into their traits, lives and backstory's that they become almost real to the creators.

Getting their look to match their personality is key, the wrong look could make your beloved character end up being unpopular to the audience, so tying everything about them into something that people can see and understand makes for a more loved character. If you want them cute, make them look cute. If you want them to be the villain, make them look bad or evil make them very obviously a nasty person. These can be seen bellow as old characters that really fit into the stereotype groups, but worked so well and were loved by all. 

After this point you fully have the image in your head about what you want them to have as traits and personality, so now onto looks. This tends to be done with basic shapes so you can just see which one you like and then build your character on top of them to see what they look like. This is an easy step to draw out and really helps you look at the possibilities.

Same with head shape, where you can imagine which head shapes will look the best on the chosen body shapes, These can be quick and sketchy becuase then you need to design the face on top. This can be done realistically but then can be taken to the extremes because all create a new character, one you may like better or one you really like for future use that you had not thought about. 

Head hight is an important step when getting across your characters size for the animators so they can consistantly keep the characters size and ratio the same. This is one of the sheets that animators will look at the most as it shows just how big the character is but the one used the most is the one bellow.

Now this lets animators get the full dimensions for the character, as well as what it looks like through fully turning so they have all the angles they need. This also helps you to see your character in 3D as 2D only shows you so much. When colour is also used, it makes the character look more complete and ready to be animated straight away.

This final section that needs to be done when creating characters is emotions. These need to be used by everyone as references to show what your character looks like when their face is being strained, relaxed, squished, shocked, pushed and pulled if needed. Its just so you can also get used to drawing your character to look the same, but also be able to show emotions that people will clearly understand.

As you can see these are some of the many steps in character design that i found is used in the industry and it really makes you see all the work that goes in to every character that makes its way to the screen. I will be doing all of these in this project as we will be designing characters of our own.