Character Design

If you have ever seen the movie Robots, the character design is just awesome!  About 6 years ago, I purchased the “The Art of Robots” and it has been one of my favorite books since.










Investigate: your design problem then Analyze the problem and break it down into simpler elements.

Plan:  Choose the best idea.

Create: the character design.

Evaluate:  the design and rework the design if necessary.

Animated Robot Design!

Essential question: How do you develop an idea?  Where do ideas com from?

Unit Question: What is the process for developing a character?

Introduction:

You are to create a new robot character to be used to be featured in an upcoming film.  At this point, the characters are fairly open either the protagonist or antagonist. 

Objectives

At the end of this unit you will be able to:

• ­ Identify the features of a good toy and incorporate them into your designs.
• ­ To design simple electronic circuits using computer software.
• ­ Identify common electronic components used and their safe and proper handling.
• ­ To use project boards to wire up temporary electronic circuits for testing purposes.
• ­ Be able to use the soldering iron safely to make permanent connections on Printed Circuit Board(PCB).
• ­ Clearly document the sources of information used.
• ­ Be able to convey your ideas effectively to others.
• ­ Be able to work in a team
• ­ Recognize man’s need to invent and innovate

Apart from the design and creation of a toy, which involves all the four stages of design cycle, the other teaching/ learning activities covered will be:-- formative and summative assessments which will mostly test students subject knowledge. This unit will involve extensive teaching sessions in the class and practical sessions in the lab. To gauge student response, quizzes and short question answer sessions will also be organized in the respective classes themselves.
Challenge

Design and create the next lead character for the next Robots movie. Your design should be a simple charismatic robot design with personality, could play either antagonist or protagonist. · Observe all the safety rules while using materials &tools · Use materials available in your home for making the toy · Your blog should be used to journal your process of each step. · This project will be assessed as a summative task in the technology and as a formative task in Humanities (History)

Resources

Follow these steps

Investigate

Use your blog to journal and record each step.  You blog or Process Journal should answer the following (The Design Specification):

• What do you need to design this character? (The requirements - Tools, knowledge, Ideas, Experience, Information)
• How and where will you get the resources and skills you need?
• What are the restrictions you’re working in? Media, deadline, target age group, function, etc, are all restrictions.
  • Research what are and have been some of the most popular robots over time.
  • Look at a range of robot designs and analyze the aesthetics and personality traits.
• What are the most important aspects of your character? (What does your character need to be a successful?)
  • The character functions visually, therefore has to be visually appealing
  • The character will be seen and heard, and therefore has to display their personality visually and through dialogue.
  • The characters will be in a long form story, and therefore has to have a complex personality that can be slowly examined
  • The character will be in print and film therefore must translate well into that medium, both aesthetically and conceptually.
• What are some of the features you would like to build in, but are not critical to a successful solution?
• How will you know it works? (List the test criteria that your product must pass to be successful)

*remember to cite your references.

Plan

Brainstorm:
Start with a mind map, starting with the character’s role in the middle: protagonist. Begin associating words and writing them down. Think with your senses as well as your imagination, and don’t censor yourself. When you are finished, it’s time to refine the mind map. Circle the words that stand out to you, that describe a character you would be interested in. Don’t worry if other will be interested at this point, if you’re not then there’s no point in choosing it.
Create the physical character, with words and sketches:

• General physical description
• Body type
• Proportions
• Material make-up (is your character flesh, robotics, alien, or anything else?)
• Gender
• Surface texture
• Colour
• Facial Structure
• Movement (how does your character physically carry themselves?)

Thinks to consider:

Proportion, Shape and Skeleton of a Character
Most cartoon characters do not look very realistic; however, their proportions and shapes are determined by realistic principles. Take references and determine which shapes you would like to achieve a "cartoony" look. Anatomy has to be adequate but you can change shape for cartoon look. For example a robotic character look like dog is having dog anatomy and body shape.

Mass and weight of character
Mass and weight of character determine their size and appearance and help in animation. A Character with more weight and mass will do fewer movements where as character with less weight and mass will do quick and fast movement.

Mood and Facial expression
The ability to draw a character, while a great accomplishment, is, however, of little avail unless one also can give portrait values—expression and character—to his subjects. Facial expression makes a character drawing alive.  Mood of a character is reflected by his facial expressions and help audience to understand what character want to communicate.

Attitude
The word attitude itself has a list of various meanings when someone says change your attitude; bad, controlling, polarizing, upset, apathetic, down, or many other single word adjuncts. Your attitude is amazing; great, happy, joyful, compromising, friendly, hopeful and this list also can go on.  Attitude can be positive or negative and is must to determine what kind of attitude your character is having. This also help in determining whether character is hero or villen, whether he is weak or strong or timid.

Body language
Body language of character shows his actions. Attitude, gestures, movements and facial expressions, all comes under body language and help character to do actions and movements. While speaking and reacting on something body language help to bring out desired emotion. Without body language a character will be dead.

Perspective
Choosing a perspective means choosing character to tell a story.  Perspective make understand characters problem, goal, what character want, how character will solve problem, what will be the result of his actions.

Attire
Attire of a character determines his status, culture, background and actions. Clothing, makeup, jewelries, accessories all comes under attire of a character.

Role
What role your character is going to play, has to be clearly defined. This will make audience understand what your character does.

Create a character history. A character’s life never begins at the beginning of your story, and the most believable characters will act in ways that expose their past experiences. Character histories are important, but don’t need to be complicated. Look for elements that will create desires and conflicts, the essence of any plot. You need to describe the following:

• Your character’s personality
• a quick timeline of your character’s past, present and future.

• When you have several ideas for a solution, choose the three best ideas / directions.  (Ask your friends for ideas too.)
• Document your chosen ideas; use text, diagrams, story boards, screen-shots or any other visuals that will showcase your ideas
  Then start sketching your ideas.

Then we are going to start thinking about character motivation. I want you to three short paragraphs. Each will a single event from the character’s life told from three different perspectives:
· Telling the story to a stranger. How does your character want to be perceived? How much information are they going to reveal?
· Telling the story to a close friend. How will they confide in them?
· Telling the story to themselves. What would they never tell to anyone else.
After this, you should have a character that’s good to go for a final, good copy drawing! Feel free to post your work, sketches, mind maps, writings and finished drawings. I’d like to see how other people design their characters!
Sketch Ideas:

• Develop a number of design ideas and sketch them.  Scan or photograph your ideas and then post them in your blog.

Survey your peers and maybe a focus group, of what designs they prefer.  Then Decide which idea you want to work on.

For 3D Modelers:

Create an orthographic drawing that represents your design.

• In the side view, remove the arm to reveal the shoulder and torso.
• For the Front view, rotate hands to show both top and sides.

 

CREATE

Use a computer software package to design you’re a final concept character.

Evaluate

1. Suggest any improvements, which could be made to the toy.
2. Show the character to the families having kids/(or even to the kids)/peers and then write down their response.

http://www.animationsupplement.com/index.php/category-list/70-character-concept-designing

http://www.cloudscapecomics.com/2011/07/20/an-introduction-to-graphic-novels-character-design/
Old Woman, character design.
Storytelling is comprised of three main elements: a setting, a plot and some characters. In this lesson we will go over a working methodology for creating compelling and original characters for your own stories or for a collaborative project. Creating characters is a great treat, and often the favourite exercise of writers everywhere. There are many ways to examine, develop and refine characters, but designing them is a completely different subject. Before one goes down the path of character design, we must first understand the foundation of the practice: design.
Design is about developing a working method to suit a function or need, as each instance of your design method will be different. For example, you may be a character designer, but designing a character for a comic or a video game or a novel are three very different instances. The goal is to create one method that can serve all three best. Your method is what makes you an artist, not your skill, perceived talent or even ideas (we’re post modern, remember? All ideas are derivative anyways). What defines one artist to the next is how they work through the method of taking an idea and translating into their visual (or audio, or performance, or whatever) form.
In this lesson, I will provide a simple framework that is commonly used and you can build upon it yourself. This is where the whole “there are no rules in art” comes in. For every suggestion, the opposite, the negation or something slightly different will work as well. Never say to yourself “I have this great idea, but it doesn’t fit the framework I learned in that graphic novels class”. That’s bullocks. Frameworks are supposed to help drive, define and ground ideas, not limit their existence. Be flexible, and allow your method to grow and evolve. Self reflect on your method, write these reflections down and be observant. Like we briefly discussed in the first class, being an artist is not just a profession, it’s a state of mind.
So, without further adieu, the character design framework.

1. Identify and understand your design problem.

• why are you making this character?
• what are the restrictions you’re working in? Media, deadline, target age group, function, etc, are all restrictions.
• Your design problem may be simple or complex, they are as different as snowflakes. Do be honest with yourself, and don’t make something more complicated than it needs to be.

2. Analyze the problem and break it down into simpler elements

Your problem is you need to make a protagonist for a graphic novel (of an undetermined genre), break it down into:

• The character functions visually, therefore has to be visually appealing
• The character will be seen and heard (through speech bubbles), and therefore has to display their personality visually and through dialogue.
• The characters will be in a long form story, and therefore has to have a complex personality that can be slowly examined
• The character will be in print and therefore must translate well into that medium, both aesthetically and conceptually (this is why I think 3D rendered comics tend to look strange, they don’t fulfill this need).

At this point it’s time to do some idea making, which will be covered later in this lesson. Remember how I said there are all sorts of exercises for examining, developing and refining a character? Now’s the time to use them. The framework assumes that at this point you’ve done some brainstorming and are then ready to:

3. Choose the best idea.

This needs to solve all parts of the original design problem you identified in step 1.

4. Draw the Character.

You should have already been sketching, trying out different things and playing around in step 2. Now it’s time to do a technical drawing of the character – the good copy. Draw your character from many angles, with different costume if necessary, and get a good feel for who they are.

5. Evaluate the results.

Ask others what they think. Get them to try and guess who the character is to see if your were able to accurately depict their personality visually. Talk to people you trust and who are thoughtful, not to people who will want to spare your feelings. This is not the time to get squeamish, you need a really good character.

6. Rework the design if necessary.

A very simple, yet important step. I often have students who skip this step because they are simply “ready to move on”. While that might be an accurate feeling for more completed work (like trying to resist the urge to go back and redraw the first 10 pages of your comic because you’re drawing has improved – that’s a “move on” moment), during the design process a small moment of reflection and reworking is necessary. Grab the red pen and make the changes that need to be made.
Now the process is finished and you should have a pretty good foundation for a character. In the next lesson we move into the hard part: making the actual comic.

Step 2 Expanded

The design problem in our class is simple. We need to come up with a character (or a few characters) that can be the cast of our comics. All of the above expansions that I outlined in step two still apply. While comics have a literary component, they are visual as well. The visual design of our character is going to be as important as their literary content.
When at this step of the design process, ideas are king. We want to have many of them and have the freedom to develop them in different ways. I have some exercise suggestions, but there are many more available online, in books and from other artists. Feel free to add these to your library of idea generating methods.

• Observation. The goldmine of ideas. Wei and myself come up with great characters by just observing people in public, on transit or in cafes and letting our imaginations run wild.
• Brainstorm with others. Get into the mode where nothing is unacceptable and no idea is too wild and just run with it. It’s amazing how differently two people think, and putting them together can yield fantastic results.
• Locate reference materials. Pictures, clippings, movies, television, books, magazines. Everything is reference. It’s not just visual either, characters in other novels can start as the foundation for something new.
• Use word play and mind mapping. Automatic writing is fantastic. We’re in idea mode, turn off your critical brain and let things flow. You can scrutinize later.
• Fantasize about your characters. Daydream scenarios, think of how they would speak. You can even turn them into temporary imaginary friends. Anything to get the ideas going.
• Look for symbolism and myth. Archetypes can make very solid character foundations.

Sketching Your Character

Character sketches
You need to get that pencil moving. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, stays in your head. That’s a terrible place for ideas. Write and draw on the same pages, don’t pre-organize yourself in the idea stage. Story ideas don’t need to start in a word processor on the computer and characters don’t need to start hand drawn (why not try some collage?). Here are some things to think about with the visuality of your character:

• Shapes. Play with them, they are powerful tools. Their counterparts are scale and proportions, so play with those as well.
• Expression exercises. Try the 25 Expression Challenge, a popular meme on Deviant Art. I use it all the time.
• The five dot exercise: Get someone to draw five random dots on a piece of paper. You then choose two of the dots to be hands, two to be feet and one to be the head of your character. Now you have to draw your character in those constraints (you can get some great, twisted positions).
• Add and subtract elements from a sketch. Either physically with an eraser, or by redrawing.
• Shift elements, reshape, skew, squash, stretch, etc.

Character Design Exercise

We’re going to create a character for our graphic novel project that we will start in the next class. You may follow this process or a different process for other characters, but for now we’ll try out a pre-described method to see how the process works.
Our design problem: we need to create a visual, drawn character for a graphic novel that will serve as our protagonist. We need to finish this in roughly a week.
We break it down into the following elements:

• Our character is visual and needs to be visually appealing
• Our character will be drawn repeatedly, and can therefore not be too complicated
• Our character will be the protagonist, so they need strong desires and conflicts and a concise history.

Example Mind Map
Brainstorming
Start with a mind map, starting with the character’s role in the middle: protagonist. Begin associating words and writing them down. Think with your senses as well as your imagination, and don’t censor yourself. When you are finished, it’s time to refine the mind map. Circle the words that stand out to you, that describe a character you would be interested in. Don’t worry if other will be interested at this point, if you’re not then there’s no point in choosing it.
Create the physical character, with words and sketches:

• General physical description
• Body type
• Proportions
• Material make-up (is your character flesh, robotics, alien, or anything else?)
• Gender
• Surface texture
• Colour
• Facial Structure
• Movement (how does your character physically carry themselves?)

Create a character history. A character’s life never begins at the beginning of your story, and the most believable characters will act in ways that expose their past experiences. Character histories are important, but don’t need to be complicated. Look for elements that will create desires and conflicts, the essence of any plot. You need to describe the following:

• Your character’s personality
• a quick timeline of your character’s past, present and future.

Lastly we’re going to do two things – the 25 Expression Challenge for your character. Don’t be discourages if you don’t finish them all, just try as many as you can. Don’t pick expressions that you think will suit your character, pick them at random.
Then we are going to start thinking about character motivation. I want you to three short paragraphs. Each will a single event from the character’s life told from three different perspectives:

• Telling the story to a stranger. How does your character want to be perceived? How much information are they going to reveal?
• Telling the story to a close friend. How will they confide in them?
• Telling the story to themselves. What would they never tell to anyone else.

After this, you should have a character that’s good to go for a final, good copy drawing! Feel free to post your work, sketches, mind maps, writings and finished drawings. I’d like to see how other people design their characters!


http://www.fastcharacters.com/

We’ve created hundreds of characters for happy customers worldwide.

When we design your character we use four fast phases, each with their own distinct role.  These are: the Discovery Phase, the Sketch Phase, the Color Phase and the Delivery Phase.  These are very simple stages used to break down the design of your new character or mascot. It might sound complex but don’t worry, we’ve done this hundreds of times and we will guide you through each phase with a minimum of fuss.

Phase 1: Discovery Phase

The Discovery Phase allows you to communicate your ideas to your artists.  We’ve created a very simple Character Planner which will allow us to download your brain – and allow you to communicate your ideas to your artists.
Time to complete: Approx. 5 to 15 minutes

Phase 2: Sketch Phase

The Sketch Phase is where we create initial design concepts of your character / mascot.  Here we will explore the ideas you communicated to us in the Discovery phase.  Enjoy unlimited concepts and revisions during this stage!
Time to complete: Approx. 3-7 days

Phase 3: Color Phase

The Color Phase is where we take your approved sketch and begin to add outlines and color.  Enjoy unlimited color changes during this stage!
Time to complete: Approx. 1-3 days

Phase 4: Delivery Phase

The Delivery Phase is the last phase and one where we do final quality checks and deliver your final character to you!
Time to complete: Approx. 1 day