Pre-Production - Character Designs

It's fair to say I have made things slightly difficult for myself with this module. If you have read my last Pre-Production blog post, you'll know that my next animation project is completely based on how children think and perceive the world around them. This obviously therefore involves children as the main characters, which is difficult for me as I am not overly confident when it comes to drawing people. This is something I would really like to practice and gain my own style in, but seeing as I am still working that out, I did not feel comfortable drawing people in this animation.

I attempted to find some sort of style, but it became slightly abstract and more suitable for an older audience.

This then resulted in me finding different ways of portraying the characters. My first idea was to use animals, in a similar way to Aardman's Creature Comforts animations. I began to sketch an animal to test it out and decided to attempt to draw a crocodile. This went ok, however I still didn't feel confident in the design and knew I wanted something slightly more simplistic.

This is when I decided to take my character designs down a few levels and make them very basic and childish. I thought about how when I was younger, our classes at primary school would be asked to do a self portrait to put on an object such as a tea towel, which parents could then buy. I remember a lot of these self portraits looking like blobs with stick arms and legs. This then made me think about using really simple characters that may appeal to children, and making them really bright and colourful. And so I drew these:

orange

blue

pink

green

purple

yellow

I'm quite happy with these character designs as I feel that the simplicity has a certain charm to it. They're very childish and fit the target audience well too. I've received some good feedback from peers when I show them the character designs alongside the audio recordings of the children speaking, so I know they fit nicely together. I also received some positive feedback from people who came to view our recent exhbition.