Research: Character Design for Chosen idea (The Analog Kid

The Aim of this research is to collect and compile ideas from the industry into a mood board, analyse what makes the design effective and how I can incorporate these elements into my own work.

The characters for my initial idea will be based on 2 opposing themes, The main character will be grounded in reality and based on a human character. The 2nd Character, who will appear in a dream sequence, will be much more fantasy based. This is for multiple reasons, the first is the allow the viewer to more easily differentiate between the characters in a scene, and the second reason is that it will allow me to design a wide range of characters, showing my designing and modelling skills. Below is a mood board, for character ideas, as well as additional research into movement and how transitions could occur. Another reason is that the characters will reflect one another's weaknesses in their designs, connecting the designs on a fundamental level.

Character research:

MAIN CHARACTER




For my first idea, the character will have two states: Child and either Teen or Adult. I researched all these areas of which you can find below, this characters design will be based in reality, especially with the child design, the elder version of herself will have more else world elements but will remain mostly true to the younger version of herself. I looked into characters that have some exaggerated features, to see how different people do this, I plan to take this research and implement it into my own designs.





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To further this research on I will look into a young child's movements, as well as how a young kid emotes, to help capture the innocence that many children have. The same can be done for all the characters. As it will help add to the believability of the characters.





PROTAGONISTS/ OTHER CHARACTERS:



For the characters that will appear in the Dream sequence, these characters will be much more abstract and less grounded. I want them to be based on toys she may own and play with and things she shes throughout her daily life, these could be ornaments, toys, game characters, and other such items. In addition, the characters do not necessarily have to be human and can be based upon animals and so on.








Character Movement Moodboard

I felt that it was important to research Storyboard and animatics early for how characters move dynamically. Below are two gif's that show characters moving through a 3D environment despite being rendered in 2D. it also gives me an helping hand as I will be able to reference these gifs when it comes to creating my own storyboard and animatics.

Dream sequence transition idea:

I felt that it was also important to research how a transition between the real world and the dream sequence could occur without appearing cliched or amateur-ish, below is a clip of such a sequence that I found to be quite enjoyable. I will attempt to use this as inspiration for when I write my story.

Overall, I feel that I have now had a good foundation of research of which to go into more detail with and also begin my own concept design work. From here, i feel that is will be very important to research the industry processes into pre-production, and also their approach to character design.