Applied Animation: Character Design

Today I have been working on character design for the main character of my animation. I had drawn a basic character design for this character in my rough animatic but that was always going to be altered when it came to making my final animation.

Upon showing my animation presentation to my class, Malachi gave me feedback that he really liked how the animation had a simple, cartoony style. He told me that this gave the short a friendly, more light feel. He felt that because it is done in a sort of innocent style that it might make it easier for young people with depression to watch and connect with the short if it's done with a simple, friendly style.

I was glad to hear this because even though I think the style works well, I was worried it might be a little too cartoony and might undermine the subject matter.

I felt that the character design did not need to be too altered, just tweaked.

To create the initial design, I wanted her actions and physicality to be realistic but her physical appearance to remain cartoony and simple. To accomplish this I looked at a massive amount of photos to reference from the website Shutterstock.

Each of these images were under the category 'depressed young woman' and I was very lucky as I had plenty of reference material to use. 

One of the main criticisms I had about my animatic was that the girl in the animation might be a tad too old for ChildLine. It was suggested to me that I focus my animation on a sightly younger girl.

Even though this point was was also subject to criticism with someone else saying that 18 year olds can also contact ChildLine and would be more likely to contact ChildLine to do with depression than another charity such as Samaritans. But I did still feel like I was slightly pushing the age and maybe should reduce it a bit. 

I really didn't want to reduce her age by much because I wanted to create a realistic character and how do you make something realistic? Base it on reality, so she would still be heavily inspired by the people I know who are around the same age as me. Therefore I decided to make her 17. But I wanted to keep her age vague, this is so young people could watch this animation and maybe if their 15 for example, they could see her as 15 and relate to her easier. I didn't want it so young people watch the animation and see her age as vague so she could be 18 or could be older.

(Above) the girl in the middle is my final (rough) design for my female protagonist. I felt that by giving her a slightly rounder face and bigger eyes it might make her look younger than she actually is. So when in actuality she's 17 but young viewers could watch the animation and she her as younger.

(Reference)