In applying to this course, I didn’t have a lot of animation work in my portfolio, so I ended up using a lot of my character design work instead. I’d have said that my work was already ‘stylistically’ suited for animation, but as I’d always found it overwhelming to try, I had very little experience making these characters move. Doing so, I was bound to need a different approach designing characters, and I wanted to explore some of this process.
For the initial batch of exercises in the first term, we were asked to pick from a lineup of featureless designs – this was good to the extent that it helped me focus more on the movement and timing, which I’m sure was the intention. I was eager to try animating a fully designed character, though.
While working on the bouncing ball exercise, I started work on a simple animation of one of my own characters sneezing, which I thought would’ve been fairly simple. I took a reference video from Shutterstock and used it to reference some keyframes.
With more figure drawing experience under my belt now, I feel like I should have mapped out the basic shape of the body first, making it easier to animate a humanoid character. I also planned to have some follow-through with the hair, which I never finished.
A few weeks later, we began the character design project, which I was quite excited for. I found that making a character moodboard was surprisingly useful. I’ve always tried to come up with ideas in my head and cross-reference them using Google image references – but having all my thoughts and inspirations on one page was very helpful, and something I’ll try to make a habit of in the future.
For the body acting exercise, I had been thinking about doing a robot character with rubberhose-like limbs. This became a flashy, stylish robot girl. I gave the character long limbs, inspired by a character designer called Nelnal.
Many people commented that this design looked complicated, but I wasn’t sure if the character would be readable if I removed too many details. I probably should have rethought my approach here.
Even after cleaning up my animation, there were a few things that continued to bother me. I didn’t like the hair bangs, as its shape didn’t make much sense in 3D, and I didn’t properly consider how it would work. If I had more time, I would’ve redrawn them
So what did I learn? First and foremost, that I have to swallow my pride when it comes to creating characters for animation! There are some things I just can’t feasibly do, considering my current skill level and the time I’m working with. With enough time, I can plan out a character sheet andcreate a moodboard, but if I don’t have time for those things, I should draw something that’s simple, and that I’m not likely to change my mind about.