Visual Language- Study Task 2 - Captain Character- Character Design & Professional Practice- How to Animate Film Cartoons

Character Design & Professional Practice-

How to Animate Film Cartoons by Preston Blair

Preston Blair's book How to Animate Film Cartoons is a brilliant book to look at character design from the basics, as he shows how to take simple shapes and turn them into completely different characters. This is an important stage when animating as you need to understand shapes and the basics before you can build them up into the characters you see as the end result. This can be seen in this images where it shows what is underneath the characters to make the final view.

This is also shown with designing the head shapes and facial features. I did this stage at the beginning as it can drastically change the overall look of the character your designing and going for. For example, small round heads create cuter characters visually, and long heads with droopy eyes create a simple and tired character. These are good to experiment with as you could change the outcome of your characters look with very small shape changes, even if you didn't think you could find a better design, looking into this could help you find out if you can make your character better. 

The book also shows things like pose references and angles of the character so animators can understand how to create a full 36oº of their character and it be able to look the same from every direction. This is important for when it does to animating them as you need to be able to keep the overall look of the character the same so the animation looks correct as well as getting the overall look to be to a high standard.