Extended Practice: Developing Initial Character Designs

During the process of developing the storyboard for my animation I begun to get a realisation for what I wanted my characters to look like. Essentially at this process I am talking about my main two protagonists, Cop and Daughter. I do not know any cops or girls aged 10-17 (apart from my sister who's 18) so most of my research at this stage came from gathering images as part of secondary images.

Gathering Inspiration for Cop

All of these images are admittedly taken from TV shows and movies, in particular I have looked to the American drama TV series Southland for inspiration.

The police officers in this show most resemble the look of what I'd like the cop in my animation to look like. Furthermore, where the show is set in Los Angeles is essentially where I wanted to set my animation, somewhere that is middle/working class, so somewhere where there is gun crime, yet not an area of poverty.

Above are sketches I drew from looking at the reference material. Again, I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted him to look like in my head. I wanted him to look fairly blocky, and well built. I wanted there to be a slight contrast between the two main characters, whereas the dad is quite big and block-like the daughter is smaller and more stick-like. That being said, I definitely don't want their designs to be too exaggerated. I wanted to keep their physicality's reasonably realistic.

Bob Parr from the Disney Pixar film The Incredibles resembles the qualities in aesthetic I want to go for with Cop although in the case of Bob Parr, his physique is incredibly exaggerated. I want the characters I create to look obviously cartoon-like to a certain extent yet still be grounded in reality.

Gathering Inspiration for Daughter

Gathering inspiration and reference material for the daughter was harder than Cop. I don't know many 10, 13 or 17 year olds so asked my sister who's 18 if she could share photos from the last 8 years with me, so that's where I got the above photos. This was helpful as these photos were not all staged. I always find it more useful if the reference photos are not staged so that I can create more realistic imagery from them, but unfortunately photos that are 100% natural are often quite hard to come by. People just do usually pose in photographs, that is why I often like getting reference photos from movies because that's when people are in character.

The best inspiration for Lucy (the daughter) aged 10 came from Natalie Portman's character in the Luc Besson film Leon. The character is a similar age to Lucy at the start of the animation and has a similar personality. Older versions of the character were far easier to gain reference material for but below are concept sketches of inspiration for the character at her youngest in the animation.