On Character Design

So the first bit of Character design I've put up here :D Good tiems.

We were set our first major project on the 26th August. This was a storyboarding project and had us choose from a selection of 3 different scripts. I chose a storyboard based on Ranger Rick adventures which starred 4 characters. A female fox by the name of Scarlett Fox, A male Racoon called Ranger Rick, a male Badger named Boomer Badger and a male Firefly named Felix.

I started off by making very basic sketches of the types of characters I wanted to be in this storyboard, before moving onto sketches of different poses this character could make, (to see whether I really liked the style i'd chosen) then finally I worked on basic expressions, colouring and turn arounds.

When designing these characters I looked up quite a few tips on character design, this page on computerarts came in very useful and prompted me to research the animals I was working with adn the audience this animation would be typically aimed at, before jumping straight in with designs. The concept of silohetting characters also really helped me. Making sure I didn't design characters with anatomy too close to each other, so even if they were all silohettes, they can be told appart. All the characters I designed are very simple and basic looking so that they work well and are easily distinguishable in my storyboard. "Animation 1" a book I borrowed from the library by Preston Blair was another one of the resources I used when designing my characters.

Scarlett Fox

Boomer Badger

Ranger Rick

Felix Firefly

Although designing and planning my characters in this way was a somewhat time consuming process, I feel it helped speed things up and really helped me when actually drawing out my storyboard. I didn't have to make up what a character looked like, could reference back to my turn arounds when I wanted different angles of the character and it allowed me to get a level of detail and continuity into the characters that I don't think I would've managed if I had drawn them straight in without thinking about design first.

A couple of pages of my storyboard are above, I have completed 70 frames of storyboard for this script in all, which I will post when I have finalised and completed them. My next task is recording scratch tracks for it and editing it into an animatic.

This blog is getting way too formal for me now however xD So I should probably try and stick to one writing style instead of switching in and out like this |D