Introduction to Character Design
Designing a great character is a prerequisite for the development of a striking and memorable story. A great character design goes beyond creating a character that is visually appealing or complex. You want to develop characters people can relate to, characters they imagine meeting some day and sharing their stories.
Great characters invariably generate emotional responses from the viewers in the form of joy, sadness, compassion, anger, etc. You want people to feel something when they meet your character for the first time. You want them to root for your character and emotionally react when its journey comes to an end.
Designing a great character takes a lot of time. It involves trying out different shapes, colors, pieces of clothing, facial expressions, and types of movement (to name a few) in order to define features able to bring its personality to life.
Pixar character design for Russell, from the movie UP:
http://pixar-animation.weebly.com/uploads/8/7/6/3/8763219/1384621_orig.jpg?654
Here is a list of tips inspired by Pixar’s approach to character design, which can help you to develop a successful character:
Find characters you like and try to answer these questions:
- What is it about these characters that make you like them?
- What are their particular personality traits?
- How these traits translate into their physical appearance and into the way they move?
- How do they fit within their stories?
Think about your audience. Different audiences will have different tastes (for example, characters designed for small children usually have basic colors and shapes. See 'Pocoyo' and 'Hey Duggee' for characters designed with a very young audience in mind).
Make sure your character is unique. If you decide to create a talking circle, what makes it different and more special than the other talking circles that already exist?
Exaggerate your character's features to make its personality pop.
Choose colors and shapes that allude to your character's personality and emotions.
It is all about your character’s personality, so make sure it has a strong one! It doesn’t matter if your character is a hero or a villain, its personality must be interesting and clear, so your audience will have an emotional response to it.
Give your character a range of emotions as your story evolves. This will help showcasing even more its personality. You don’t want to end up with a monotone character (unless that is part of your story!).
Give your character something to look for, a flaw to overcome. This will make your character more complex and will hook the audience to look forward to a solution.
Create a backstory for your character. Where does your character come from? What are its past experiences? What big events shaped your character’s personality and the way it sees the world? Even if you won’t use it in your animation, a backstory helps to define your character’s personality and aspirations, and might be as interesting as its present journey. You might end up liking it so much, you you feel inspired to create an ‘origins’ story.
Create an interesting world for your character. The world you character lives in is as important to the story as the character itself, so spend time developing it.
Reflect upon and redraw everything you create. Try out different facial features, body shapes, pieces of clothing, props... Small changes can have a huge impact on your final animation, so spend time fine-tuning everything you create.
You can find more useful tips in Lesson 1, under Storytelling and Pre-production.