S T U D I O P R A C T I C E: OUAN05 - Developing Characters

The process for creating and developing the characters I wanted to use in my animation was actually quite straight forward and the turn around was rather quick compared to what I had imagined in terms of time taken to develop them. As previously mentioned in the blog post I made on development feedback, my initial idea for characters and the starting point for my story was a viking. The viking I created using references of other art works and historical notes and descriptions also from artifacts that have been documented online and such. From here I sketched as a starting point in reality just to get something down on paper that could potentially inspire me further and encourage my workflow. At this point I was still reading miscellaneous books based on elements and even one that I mentioned in my research blog post about animating classical elements.

The next step for me was putting a story to the idea of a viking warrior that coincided and worked with the brief description. I thought it would be interesting to have a duel occur between two warriors, of an elemental nature and really experiment with the environment and the use of ice, snow, steam and water to utilise their physical properties and create something rather appealing to the viewer, despite the lack of story and overall simplicity of the idea. At this point in the development process I start to envision the way the animation looked in my head and something I really wanted to be able to achieve with it was fluidity and natural movement within the animation and in particular the choreography of the fight between the two characters. The idea of fluid moving vikings didn't work for me, so I began to experiment and brainstorm elsewhere when it came to characters based on other work I'd scene within the animation medium. I started drawing stylised samurai concepts and after viewing several animations that featured samurais as characters I thought I could make it work with the kind of idea I wanted to pursue. This also meant I had a context and setting for the kind of environment I wanted to place them in; a rural Japan in Winter.

I looked at various references of photographs that have been taken in the past couple of hundred years since the invention of photography and found some useful images to work from when deciding about how I wanted them to look in my animation. As well as this, I used images of armor and other peoples work as small indications of where I could take my ideas and what would work. After creating three to four ideas of potential characters I drew smaller models for them, the style of the smaller models that I would draw and use in my animation. Just to get an idea for colour schemes of colour pallets I took the time to add colour to the more detailed character concepts and overall they turned out quite well. I used different tones such as brown earthy colours for one and then with another experimented with blues to represent the ice aspect of the elemental animation. However with all the colouring done I attempted to keep the colours cold and dark to make sure the characters fit the general tone and level of the environment they were in, so it looked like they belonged there.