AA: Child Character Design

This is the part of the project that I have been looking forwards to - in fact, I've been waiting for this since the start of the year. I feel like first year was so focused on technical skills that I never had time to think properly about pre-production - both to learn it and do it, which is a shame because I have always been interested in character design. This project lets me finally concentrate on it and so far I am already enjoying it way more than the last year and a half of animation.

I started off by sketching a few really loose character shapes, taking a lot of inspiration from the CN designs I looked up previously. These are ones that would be much easier to animate - something that we need if this animation is going to be over double the length of anything we've done before, and it will make any clean up I have to do much, much easier.

I narrowed it down to one shape that would be easy to draw but still looks interesting enough. I used a few CN-esque eyes and a couple of other shapes just to see what sort of ones looked good and what proportions worked. I didn't want to get it too close to any other styles, although the character second from the left on the bottom row used a lot of features from Fairly Odd Parents that worked well.

I tried a few more shapes for eyes, and while a few worked, some didn't quite look friendly enough or the right age for our character; he would be between 7-12 as that is our age range, but at this point the writing has not been 100% finalised, and we are trying not to turn it too much into a narrative, because the three of us enjoy narrative based animation and ways of working much more, but if we can achieve a decent mix the that and documentary we will be happy. I wouldn't mind doing some more writing and ideas, but since we have to pitch relatively soon which also means getting the storyboards out soon as well, I want to get as much of the design done as possible, which means concentrating wholly on this and not the story. It doesn't work out too badly - since Rebecca's main role is on animation, she has the free time now to concentrate on the story herself, and I've always enjoyed her work, so I think we're in good hands. I can always go back and change/add to any designs if anything changes, but for now I think that I am on track with what we were aiming for.

From the above drawings, I got feedback from members of my team, staff and first years to see which parts of the characters worked best. Cara really liked the flicky hair, which I do agree with, and there was a lot of positivity for the very small, simple eyes. I was inclined to go for the more almost Disney style large pupil within the two almost semi-circle lines but after the development above, I do actually really like how the smaller eyes have worked, I got to the end design on that page and the support for it was extremely good, which I am happy about because that was my favorite design so far, and one that I could see working for the sort of show that we are making. Next I will focus on him, see what else I could do, if there's anything I could add, and start to consider colour.