Developing characters is terrifying. I don't have my own style or approach to artwork and I am really feeling the pressure when it comes to generating characters that are relatable, comical, life-like etc for this brief. I am a bit daunted by how other students seem a lot more confident at this stage, especially with their own character development. Everyone has so many great ideas and I am worried mine are a little generic.
My initial lists as starting points for my characters were really helpful :
5 things that make me laugh:
- Cats: "Fluff-ball style", how they move, strange positions, rolling around, play, sound, independent animal etc
- Loud and strange laughs: Mouths and how different peoples laughs create different mouth shapes
- Tickling (obviously)
- Travel: Distance, new sights, methods of transport, hot air balloons
- Natural psychedelic substances: Salvia Divinorum, mushrooms, cacti etc
- Precious stones and gems: their meanings?
- Sea life: Creature, plants, jelly fish, fish, coral
- Raisins: Yucky taste, evil, appear in foods when you don't want them too
- Worms: Not necessarily frustrating but weird and unpleasant all the same. Spend a lot of time saving them from footpaths, just for them to wriggle back again.
- Harm to animals: Could tie in with vegetarianism/being vegan. Hunting, animals killed unnecessarily, for food?
- Selfishness/ungratefulness: Being taken advantage of.
- Knots: frustrating, need un-doing, headphones tangled in keys etc.
- Edibles that melt: Sticky ice-cream, ice lollies - stay frozen for longer please!!!
Simplifying at this early stage helped me to produce some successful characters - although I feel a little too obvious in some cases?
Characters I think I will develop further at this stage are the cacti, the travel idea with a hot air balloon and the cat idea. I also like the jellyfish idea and how they move therefore this could be an avenue to explore further. Pretty simple ideas at this stage, but I think this will help me to produce artwork to a high standard and develop my ideas further and in more depth.
Notes to self: Simplify! Stop drawing things to perfection as it holds things up. Keep things as rough ideas to be developed further at a later stage!
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Further character development:
Initial ideas
Drawing and redrawing my characters has been really helpful in developing a relationship with them and coming up with ideas for my final gif. Animating a GIF is all about movement, so I have been able to be critical of my ideas taking this into consideration.
Cacti
I really like my cacti ideas. They are based on my own million cacti currently taking over my house. Although I like the characters developed, cacti don't tend to move much, or fast unless I went down the "sped up growth" route. i currently have a crazy cacti called "T" (short for Trichocereus Peruvianus) and he has a spider called "Jerry" living on him. I could have a GIF centered around their relationship to each other.
Mushrooms
Although a wide variety of mushrooms to base one of my character on, mushrooms again don't do much (although they do grow pretty fast). As a lot of the mushrooms I have drawn here have psychedelic properties, I could try and replicate this experience in my GIF involving crazy colour and trippy effects.
Jellyfish
Jelly fish are so crazy looking and I really like the way they pulse and move through water. I am not sure how to make my characters more interesting if I was going to go with this idea, although the pulsing movement does lend itself to the repetitive looping GIF outcome.
Cat
Cats make me laugh and they can be drawn doing so many weird and wonderful things. If I am to go down the cat GIF route, I would like to focus on their subtle funny movements and try and make these as lifelike as possible. Character needs to be strong and relatable.
Hot air balloon
I would like to create an experience with a GIF if possible. Obviously involving a character (the hot air balloon in the case) but to somehow take the audience on a journey which links to my idea of travel and seeing new landscapes. This may involve a lot of elements but would be nice and a bit different if done right.
Storyboarding
I found jumping in and choosing a character to be a lot easier than I thought. I really liked my cacti idea and wanted to see how far I could go with it, therefore produced some storyboards to help. These were great fro me as I was able to experiment with movement and really see how simple my GIF could be whilst still being comical.
This idea (above) for my rolling cacti theme looks complicated and i am not sure how easy it would be to achieve. I want each cacti to be moving at seprate times in seperate directions, which would probably mean a lot of frames to result in smooth movement (which is my aim across all GIFs I produce). I really like the idea of encorporating lots of colour and texture if i do go ahead with this theme...but how do i show something spikey rolling?
My next idea is a lot more simple and possibly more successful. I feel it possibly has a stronger element of comedy and narrative which would be good as a result. This is based on my idea of "T and Jerry" as explained previously. T doesn't move much apart from the eyes which follow Jerry the spider whizzing down and around, annoying T, but then landing in a cup of T. Jerry, now all wet, whizzes back up the way he came. I think this idea will be a lot easier to achieve and have a fun aspect to it if done well.
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