Animator meeting #1

     Today, I had the first official meeting with my panel of traditional animators*. I showed them my design which I finished last week. They liked it, but they said it was “obviously” designed for a game. It lacks personality and the typical “thumbnail” approach was something they considered really typical a games approach.

*These are the same animators which I interviewed a while ago. They are 4^th year HKU animation students Ben Vinkenburg, Jessy Suharyanto and Tom Mourik.

Here are the comments of the panel;

First off, it looks nice! (Why, thank you)

- But… There is a lot of problems with this design in its current state if you want to adapt it for a traditional animation

- Way too much detail. Unless you got a very big team, this is undoable to animate properly

- She is very realistically proportioned. This means that the quality of the animation has to be realistic as well, or else it will look just plain weird

- She also has a lot of loose, flowing elements, like the shawl, her hair, the quiver, her belt etc. This means you have to animate all these different elements by adding secondary motion.  A lot of work, to say the least

- Try to use more shapes than lines. Use contrast in colors. This really helps if your character’s arms are going to overlap her body, it keeps it all readable

- Her facial features are not very visible. This is a big problem if you want to emote with her. Lay more emphasis on this, as this is vital for every animation character.

- Think about the visual style you want to use. What kind of lines will be used? How will the character interact with the background? Will the character haves lines or the background? This will avoid your character melting together with the background. You never want that to happen, because your audience will never know what is going on 

- We animators don’t have a lot of time tell the big backstory of a character. So we have to give all the information about the character through its visual design

- I think that we as animators start to think way earlier about implementing a certain visual style in the design process. I think that is a big difference with games. Your character’s personality comes more from its backstory than the actual, realistic design

- We also use more basic shapes in our designs. This helps to boost the readability of the character 

- As animators we ask ourselves these questions as quickly as possible during the design process of a character;

“ What is possible with this character?” 

“ What does this character have to do?”

Additional comments, tips  and feedback;

- Look at How To Train Your Dragon characters. The armour that they wear is designed around their personality

- Look at the design of the main character of Brave. She shares the same setting and is also an archer

- Dexter’s Labaratoy. The shape language between the characters are very distinct and really pushes the readability

- Samurai Jack. The character design of Jack is very serene, very pristine while the backgrounds are very rich in detail. It’s mostly the other way around, but they decided to it this way

- Look at the concept art of Sleeping Beauty and how they implemented the medieval form language in the characters. This could also be helpful with your character design.

- Journey, the game is a good example of how the visual style influences the game and how it helps 

- Look at the secret of Kells. A strong shape language and again very in the same setting as your project

This meeting was very useful and now I feel I’m able to move towards the second design of Brenna! Basically I’ll have to push her personality more and lay more emphasis on the face, use simpler, basic shapes and try to get rid of some unnecessary detail.