In character design this week we focused on developing our character’s designs further using shapes and silhouettes. We looked at how classic character’s can be easily recognised by silhouette alone based on their shape and posture, we then put this theory to use with own character’s. This definitely helped a lot with my character design, and aided in establishing distinctive features and poses for the character. By creating totem poles of our characters we showed significant features they had using simple shapes made of cut out paper. This helped us to consider which elements of our characters design to bring forward and stand out to help create a memorable character. Furthermore, we showcased our character’s personality by creating Top Trump cards of our character’s. For our homework we created sketches showing our character’s throughout three major stages in their life; I created designs for a child version of my character, a young adult version and the current adult version. By thinking about what the three stages of the design I should show it helped me to think about the backstory of the character and give me a more in depth understanding of the character I was creating.
In character research this week we looked at the semiotics of character design- how the audience can interpret aspects of the character’s past and their personality through their design. We looked at how we interpret sharp shapes as being associated with angry, evil characters and soft shapes with friendly, good characters. Colour is also a way the design can show a character’s personality- light bright colours being associated good and dark with bad. Certain colours can also connote certain things, e.g; red is associated with anger, pink with love, green with jealousy and nature, and blue with sadness and peacefulness. We may also be able to get an idea of a character’s background through the details in their design, for example a character with lots of scars and injuries could be interpreted as a a character who’s been through a lot, they could have gotten into a lot of fights in the past? Or perhaps they fought in a war? Sometimes however the design of a character can purposefully be misleading, the audience and other characters in a story can be deceived by the outward appearance of a character.
In dynamics this week we used the basics of anticipation and follow through as well as squash and stretch to create an animation of a human figure jumping across the page. We used our prior skills from creating previous animations to do this making this task not too much of a challenge. Using knowledge of framing and the arch of a pendulum as well as the squash and stretch of a bouncing ball. Although I’m pleased with the final results it could definitely be improved with some minor changes and the addition of more frames.
