Storyboard: When creating a storyboard, it is necessary to clearly present the entire story of the animation through shots. The most important aspect is the coloring of the pictures. A well-structured shot with a clear black-and-white contrast and correct color balance can enable the audience to understand the characters’ movements and spatial relationships in this scene. Below the shot, the lines of dialogue for the characters should be written, and a brief description of the characters’ emotions and actions should also be provided.
Sketch: Before creating an animation, sketching is extremely important. Drawing sketches can help us discover new animation ideas (including drawing from life and copying).
Design Work: I studied how to create animated characters (appearance and character story). Many creators who have little knowledge of character design concepts tend to add many decorative elements to their characters . They want to make them stand out. However, the final result often leaves their characters lacking in key design. Therefore, I believe that a good character design should have a memorable element ,a simple and prominent design feature with a clear focus on the key elements.
During my studies at Saint Martin, I realized the benefits of simplifying the appearance of animated characters, such as facilitating the drawing process. Therefore, the key to making the animation character design stand out is to determine the appearance of the character based on the character’s personality and story, so that when the audience sees the character’s appearance, they can recognize the basic setting of the character.
Research: Currently, I am focusing on the research of character design. I selected two characters from my personal projects as my research examples. Here are my design ideas:
Zazhigalka (Female): When designing this character, I aimed to create an Asian police officer living in the region of Yugoslavia. So, she wears police attire. In terms of body type, I made this character appear muscular, which makes her body shape more in line with that of a police officer (and this character has a military background). Since she is Asian, I chose the mask culture and black long hair from the Asian region as the memory points for this character.
I once posted the design draft of this character on the artist community, and her appearance sparked some discussions. Many people who saw her muscular figure thought she was male.
I believe that female characters can have very developed muscles, just like the designs of many well-known animated characters（The Bad Guys 2）。 This is also the reason why I gave this character a robust physique.
Zebra: This character is an important part of the story plot of my project. He is a murderer and also a zebra with self-awareness disorders. He is wearing the hospital gown of a mental institution. To reflect the self-awareness disorder feature of this character in terms of appearance, I did not design this character’s appearance according to the design features of a zebra. I drew the appearance of this zebra as a caterpillar and hoped that this design would trigger the viewers’ strange feelings and add a sense of mystery to the character. During the design process, I also discovered that adding asymmetrical designs to the character would make him look even stranger. This method can be used to design villain characters. That’s why I added a asymmetrical a asymmetrical arm to this character.
Experiments and Tests: Through this semester’s exercises on the principles of motion, I have learned a lot. I had studied the basic principles of animation in my undergraduate studies, but it was not in-depth. Before taking the animation course at St. Martin, I was accustomed to using the squash frame(key frame + squash frame)when drawing animations.
The advantage of this approach is that it allows for a relatively smooth movement with a small number of frames. However, I believe that adding such an action pattern to every movement would make the character’s movements too stiff. To further enrich my character movements, in this CSM practice on the principles of character animation, my goal is to learn how to draw more refined movements (character facial expressions and action details) and make the character movements closer to the natural movement laws. I tried removing the squash frame and making the character’s movements more exaggerated. I realized that designing keyframes in this way would make the movements more natural
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