Character designs for a high-speed chase sequence!

On my "Pigs in Tutus" post, I mentioned creating and developing two characters only to abandon them for a different set of characters who better suited the sequence I needed to make. Some might say I'm taking the easy way out by doing this, as the characters I'm going for are two I've been developing since April 2013: two of the cast of my webcomic, Mudskipper, whom are very close to my heart. That's exactly why I decided to board a sequence with them rather than two characters I'd only just created; having an emotional attachment to them provides me with motivation to refine their designs more than ever, and pay due attention to the cinematography of the sequence.

I created Mudskipper partially for fun and partially as an exercise to simulate the development and production of an animated TV series, including drawing the main characters hundreds of times until their appearances and attitudes felt "right." Let's press fast-forward on that process:

My main task for the character design part of this assignment was to use my current skills to refine their designs even further. I started by applying two things I'd learned since starting the course: firstly, I mapped out the straights and curves of their designs.

At the start of semester 2 I read Prepare to Board!, which mostly focuses on storyboards but also goes into quite a bit of detail on character design. I’d heard “straights against curves” before (who hasn't), but this is the first book I’ve read that explains why that principle works: it’s because the eye travels fast along straight lines and slowly along curved ones. It made me realise I tend to favour curves in my own drawings and character designs, so I thought I’d better start introducing more straight lines - to help me keep track, I charted out my characters with their straights in red and their curves in blue, adding a few more straights in the process.

I also attended an “acting for animators” workshop in which the teacher explained the concept of the “power centre” - this comes from Acting for Animators (or at least, that book popularized it). It’s where an actor, or animated character, gravitates towards as they act - Charlie Chaplin’s power centre floats around his knees, for example. I'm pretty sure I actually had heard of it before, but never got the chance to clearly define where my characters’ power centres are - I think the trial and error of drawing more than 30 pages of the comic helped me to do so. Looking back on those pages, I noticed Katsuko tends to gravitate awkwardly to just beyond one of her hips (which one depends on the requirements of the shot), while Ikki makes a lot of broad gestures that create sharp angles with his elbows - hence their power centres.

With that done, I tried to really get used to drawing them in a variety of poses and expressions.

Knowing that lip sync was part of the assignment, I drew a very rough, purposely-incomplete mouth chart for Katsuko just to get used to drawing her speaking, and plotted out what my tutors called "body sync" for her one line of dialogue:

A small but interesting challenge presented itself when I realised Katsuko would have at least a slight Forest of Dean accent, since Mudskipper is set on the Gloucestershire/Wales border - I looked up videos of the accent and, thanks to this video, I realized just in the nick of time that she'd pronounce "can't" with a short A sound. This required a smaller mouth shape than my own, long A sound would, while the A in "make" required a larger one. Her line doesn't particularly reflect the full character of the Forest accent, but paying attention to dialects was a good lesson for next time I need to animate lip sync - and voice act! (Worryingly, I only needed to pitch my voice up by 5% to sound like a thirteen-year-old.)

I then focused on giving Katsuko an outfit that would be easy to animate, but also add to the "post-apocalyptic" atmosphere and therefore the fake-out joke the sequence is based around: the viewer thinks Katsuko is the last survivor of an alien invasion being chased by one of the invaders, but in reality, Ikki is just a friend trying to give her her homework. The three-coloured dress would probably be too difficult to draw from a variety of angles, but I quite liked the "patch" idea.

From there, I felt comfortable enough to start drawing the thumbnail board and then the animatic proper - and now, as I type this on April 27th 2015, it's ready!