Character Design Process

I did say I'd update later, and I'm staying true to my word with an update! Life's exciting that way.


Anyway, initially I had conceived a film over the summer about a small penguin who becomes bored with swimming every day and admires how the birds can do all these cool aerial twists and decides he wants to fly. He would then build himself a big pair of wings, and attempt to fly. He fails and falls into the water, much to the amusement of the seagulls he was watching. However, under water he sees the fish performing similar movements to that the seagulls were. He becomes content with swimming, and joins the fish in their happy swimming dance.


This idea, however, needed to be changed and trimmed for multiple reasons. The plot was scattered (where did he get the material to build the wings?) and would have been ALOT of work for me to do. However, I had decided by this point that the film would be a 2D piece, however, the animation would all be drawn straight into Photoshop/ToonBoom using a Wacom Tablet and that my set would be CGI (most likely toon shaded)


After learning that the we could not do long films and instead could do a showreel or a vignette, I opted to do a vignette. I decided to take the bare bones of my story - a penguin tries to fly and fails - and simply animate that. The piece would be a character study of him preparing to jump, running, jumping and falling. I began to do some initially sketches of the character to get some of the ideas clear in my head.


I presented the idea to the rest of my year and my tutors, and the point was raised that penguins in animation are very common and slightly overdone. I was recommended to change the penguin into a different type of bird or animal. I decided that the point was valid, and that I wanted my vignette to stand out and that doing 'yet another penguin film' would hurt it badly. Therefore, I did some research, and began designing several characters using flightless birds and animals which have variations that can fly (flying squirrels, flying frogs, etc)

From the animals I designed, I felt the strongest and most interesting design was that of the Kakapo. The Kakapo is a small flightless parrot that lives in New Zealand. I did some research on the bird, and also found some images of the bird so that I could do some life drawing per say of the bird to research it and understand it's look a bit better. I then went further and began refining the Kakapo's design.



After deciding upon the main character, I devised a rough story based on my original penguin story. The Kakapo would try to fly by jumping out of a tree, but fails and landed in some way. I lacked an end to my story, and when I presented it the tutors again, I was given the suggestion of a flight school. This idea inspired me and the story became that the Kakakpo had somehow ended up in a flying school, and was trying to leave but was forced to jump off a cliff and try to fly. The a story was still rough in my head, but I decided that I needed at least two more characters - a teacher and another character in the line behind the Kakapo that would probably be more physically intimidating.



For the teacher, I decided that I would go with a Crane. I personally see teacher's in my mind's eye as being long, tall thin men. Sort of lanky and all bones. I thought the Crane matched this quite well, as well as providing a contrast to the Kakapo.



For the character behind the Kakapo in the line, I chose the owl. I chose the owl for several reasons. Firstly the Kakapo is also known as 'The Owl Parrot' and I thought it'd be fun to reference that. I also felt that Owl's are consistently portrayed in animation as wise old kindly creatures. I've never quite understood this as to me owl's look like the hard guys of the forest. The sort of birds that would head butt you looking at you a bit funny. So I decided my owl would be a big hulking thug who defied usual conventions with the bird.


The character designs still need to be refined, but this is as far as I have gotten. I think I may move onto creating a character sheet for the Kakapo, whose design seems to be fairly solid now. However, I feel the owl and stork need further designing, as do other students at the school who will be in the background.

Back to the sketchpad...