Developing my Character Designs

The first stage in the development of my animation this time around was the character designs as it is the characters that are integral to the progression of the narrative in my animation. I decided early on the aesthetic I wished to use for this animation; that of illustrator Don Kenn, so I applied some of the traits of his drawings to the design of my characters. Kenn uses different types of crosshatching to add tone to his drawings as opposed to tonal shading or colouring, working mostly on yellow post-it notes/paper, giving the work a distinctly hand-made and what can best be described as a warm, Autumn-y feel. The colour palette of browns and yellows also lends to this aesthetic. In order to compensate for the insanely detailed and intricate crosshatching I have worked on simplifying my character designs so they are easier to animate. 

An aspect of the design process I felt was most important was the design of the monster. In early designs (see above) the girl transformed into the monster a-la John Carpenter's 'The Thing' as opposed to being used as bait, though I feel the bait idea is more effective from a humour perspective. For these designs I took cues from H.R Giger's Alien as well as some of Manga-artist Junji Ito's work.

Keeping the designs simple was my top priority in the design process, as it was important that the characters were always in motion in the final animation, something I intended as a fix in response to feedback I received on my last project stating that the character seemed robotic and limited in motion. It was also important to keep the character designs fitting with the environment as I wanted to emphasise interaction with the environment wherever possible.