Article:“Designing characters for animation”
Author: Fernanda Frick
Author summary:
Fernanda Frick is a Chilean animator, illustrator, and director who works extensively on indie short films and graphic novels.
Article summary:
For animation, you need to think of character design as casting for live action productions. The exception, of course, is you create everything about the actors from the start. While in live action films, when you cast an actor, you get some traits off the bat of the natural person. You go through a bunch of different people and see a ton of traits and choose the best traits that fit the character you cast for. So this is a positive and negative of creating the character. Id adds a lot more that one needs to think about when creating, but it gives you much more freedom to create the exact ideal image of the character you make. On top of this, you need to think of the production pipeline as you design. When designing for 3d, there will be differences to designing a 2D animation production. For 3D, you would have to keep in mind that your designs would go to a modeler that has to translate that into a three dimensional figure, so that is limiting in some ways and impacts some draftsmanship techniques. Versus a 2D production where it would go to a storyboard and then animating directly.
Citation:
Frick, Fernanda. “Designing Characters for Animation.” Medium, Here’s the Plan - Blog, 1 Mar. 2017, medium.com/heres-the-plan-blog-eng/designing-characters-for-animation-660192a62de.
