Character Technical Class week 9 - Environment

Justin explained to us how the environment itself is a sort of character and like the props and costume it reflects the personality of the character that would dwell there.

My task was to create a Decadent Sewer so the first step as always was the research

This is the common meaning I found for Decadent:
1. Being in a state of decline or decay.

And my thoughts of a Sewer:

Cut off from light/ typically dark
dirty/ grimy
snaking tunnels
pipes
enclosed (Claustrophobic
could have some form of arches - holding structure together
columns?

These are the images I took reference from to inspire my ideas:

This Image was a huge inspiration for the Decadent theme and Kaleigh suggested thinking about the space as a cavern which the draping rotting tissues as stalactites and how caves are an enclosed space.

From these ideas I produced these enviroments:

Character Technical Classes wk 8

This week we were divided into three groups of three and four and was commissioned to design six characters based on the bios that Justin briefed us with, I worked on Jetpack Jones and Tess Brainstorm. I am not particularly happy with what I produced because I was struggling to gain something that could work and ended up rushing to meet the deadline which was wrong and I regret not giving the designs my full attention.

Jetpack Jones

Tess Brainstorm

Character Technical Classes week 7

This lesson was about quadrupeds and creatures and we were given a theme for a habitat to choose certain animals for influence to make sense for the creature design

I got Mountains

Character Technical Classes week 6 - Silhouettes and Costume Detail

This was a very useful class because I learnt that the silhouette is crucial to read how a design will work anatomically and also tells us what that character is like. I can now apply these techniques to the characters I am designing.

To put this into practice, we were given a theme to produce characters from and we had to think of the hero, villain and sidekick and size. The height scale of individual characters gives a client the idea of which character has the most power and more about what the role of that character is.

My theme was Ninja

Our second task was to add more detail into costumes on characters, making decisions on the various folds and creases of how a character's clothes would fit and bulge. This consisted on simple lines to understand the weight caused by gravity and how they fitted.

My theme was Pirates

Character Technical Classes wk 5 - Body Language and Facial Expression

It is important to remember how we can read emotions from a particular pose and language the body is conveying or an emotion in a facial expression.

We begun with body language, taking it in turns to act out a particular pose, e.g. guarded, unbalanced etc. After this we got into groups of three and then two people had to pose as archetypes, we got :
Groupie and Rockstar
Captain Awesome and the pathetic sidekick

I then tackled facial expression with Winnie the Pooh, trying out various emotions and including how the shoulders would change to convey the pose. 

Character Technical Classes wk 4 - Props

The first task was to come up with a hero, sidekick and villain based on a room, mine was bathroom and I made notes to get me started.

Bathroom

• Bath
• Taps
• Toilet
• Sink
• Shower
• Cupboard
• Tooth brush
• Towel
• Bath mat
• Flanel
• Pipes
• Scales
• Shampoo/ Soap bottle
• Toilet roll
• Soap
• Toilet Brush
• Rubber Duck

Story

• Invading of bacteria/ pesticide keeping hero from cleaning it
• Flooding pipes burst/ spray, room starts flooding
• Hero - Bath (square shape), Tap controls pressure, basin
• Sidekick - Soap slips all over the place, toilet brush
• Villain - Shower snakes, classic horror taking place, Toothbrush elongated (villain frame)

The next task was to think about how certain props are stylised to suit a characters personality I was given the Hulk, eventually I thought more about the character and eventually got into the task and gave him props he could find laying around or wrecked.

Character Technical Classes 3 - Three Dimensions

This developed the shape technique from last week creating a structure using spheres and lines, in which you would build the character up from, similiar to the technique I used in the PDF tutorials of the animation project last year.

The first task was to draw basic faces using simple shapes but trying to make the design as interesting as possible

Dr Facilier from The Princess and The Frog

I then had to apply the structure technique with an existing character, which was Dr Facilier from the Princess and the Frog. The first drawing was trying to pick out the shapes that make up the character and then I tried exaggerating the proportions to get different and interesting alternatives

The Final task was to use three diferent basic shape structures and create a design page of sidekicks, working out how the proportions and shapes could be manipulated to create different characters.

Character Technical Classes 2 - Shapes

This week we learned about the basic shapes that make up a certain character. Square is a fixed shape and usually resembles a muscular character - the hero. Triangle is a pointed/spiky so it resembles dangerous - the villain. Circle or circular means harmless and soft - Sidekick. Sometimes these shapes can be combined to represent each character. 

The Task was to take a recognisable character and add new shapes to change the original characteristic but still keep the design as recognisable. Not as easy as it sounds but here are my attempts. 

Winnie The Pooh

The first attempt I didn't think about how I wanted to do it so added up as a Pooh/Piglet clash, the second time I decided to make the character muscular by trying to use square shapes. I feel this attempt is better but could of been moved on further if I had another opportunity.

Pocahontas

This time I tried to make the character villainous by trying to change the shape of her body and making the lines more Spiky. This one presented more of a challenge because this character is already a strong design and defined by the pose in the original image, indicating that she is a powerful figure. I found it hard to keep the character's identity as Pocahontas because of how extreme the changes needed to be to make her now perceived as a villain.

Character Technical Classes week 1

After the exciting character project briefing from Justin and the mystery of picking random cards to discover what kind of characters we would be working with over the next ten weeks, we began to sketch characters based on the words that Justin called out to us. I found this hard because without any research or referencing then you have to form images based on memory and imagination alone. Below are the two characters I had to work on.

Ghostly Clown

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