In this blog post I will document how sketching character design sheets and storyboards onto paper has helped me improve my character design as well as inform and make my animations feel more believable.
These are initial sketches (Fig 1) of the two bouncing characters I created, it was a test to see how the things such as antenna or wings would move at extreme poses during the bouncing cycle, I focused on making sure they looked believable and natural. Sketching the character, even though I wasn’t storyboarding helped me get a feel for the character through how I moved them, which in turn helped me bring the animation to life more.
The above sketches were for an exercise where we had give a chair a personality or emotion, I considered a few options as shown above in Fig 2, but they all seemed too rigid so, trying to find a way for the chair to stop being so rigid I draw it stretching, once I figured the chair resembled a cat, I found that I could move the chair in an organic and lifelike manner, I used a video reference as well as some squash and stretch to achieve a cat-like stretch in the final outcome.
Fig. 3 shows some sketches I did before I started to work on my quadruped walk cycle, I had gotten in my head about making the dog look as realistic as I could, that I forgot that I just needed to make it believable. I took reference from the Disney character Pluto, a big dog but lanky, and this really helped me when key framing the movement because I could visualise how this lanky dog would move. The final outcome of my quadruped cycle held the same personality as these sketches in my opinion.
Lip-sync task: The Angry Parrot
Having gotten more confident by the time I got to the lip-sync exercise I wanted to create a really well-rounded character that would drive the story and that maybe I could use again in the future. Having given my character an angry/annoyed audio line I decided to portray him as angry with a bit of insecurity, and these show through in his expressions, not making eye contact, looking unsure before remembering why he’s angry, I feel that these made him a believable character. To make sure I got the character design consistent throughout the animation I sketched a character sheet that included expressions and a side profile (Fig 6 and Fig 7) these sheets in turn informed the lip-sync chart as I knew how his face moved and the limitations of it.
The lip-sync chart I created shown above in Fig 8 made adding the mouth to the audio pretty easy, some sounds are pretty hard to show such as ‘s’ or ‘kuh’ but I learnt from playing around with different techniques that I didn’t have to animate every sound in every word, only the prominent ones such as vowels as these are the loudest or ‘th’/’f’ as these are unusual and our eye picks up on these more.