Creating a Character

The main idea behind creating a character is capturing the essence of the creation. If we are set out to create a monster, we have to identify the few characters that we want the monster to possess. For instance, the skin of the monster, whether he is hairy, pimpled skin, wart infested skin and others. After all these characteristics are detailed out, we would want to create a full picture of the character from various angles just like a mugshot. This is to ensure that even as time passed and even if the artist changed, the character will remain the same. So the initial hatching of the idea and acceptance of the character by the entire production team is an important one.

We first create the character at various pose. The character could be smiling, laughing, crying or running. All these facial movement and physical movement help us tell any other artists that is involved in the production the essence of that particular creation. It is just like knowing a new friend. Usually after knowing someone we would usually describe that person to another person who has not seen him by saying,

'Hey, I met Matt for the first time, wow that guys is tall but overall he is a nice guy. He bought me dinner and he is quite friendly and chatty. I took a picture with him yesterday, here it is.'

So, in short, we have introduced Matt quite successfully through the conversation where a very basic idea it etched out from a sentence. That is what we want when we produce the first character design draft.

The other part of the character design is actual size scaling. A good reference would be scaling to our existing characters. We would be giving a good idea as to the height and width of the character by comparing to our more established characters. We find this a more accurate match than using metric measurements because being animation, our gauge of proper standard unit of measurement are way off.

We then start to add colour to the character. After putting colours to the character, we would have it tested against different time mode. There will be the morning mode, the afternoon mode, the evening mode and the night mode. This is to give a good appreciation as to how the character would look in various mode. One person's imagination may be different from another artist.

Character Building (Part II)

The first part of character design is finding the physical character, the second part of character design is creating its other characters such as its temperament and other characteristic. The idea is to make it as life like as possible. That is the part where we hit the story board and the story board always start with some sketches...

For me it is always a nervous act in introducing a character. Sometimes we slowly slide in characters, and other times, we introduce characters with a 'BANG'. We have to be careful because if everything is a 'BANG' it makes no difference to the audiences, there must be subtle but appreciable differences.