Telling Tales: Character Research

In order to push the character design in the right direction, I decided to do a bit of research to help me get the idea of a human-like character out of my head. I watched a few animations and thought of others in order to get an idea for the kind of simplicity I am looking for.

Because Lauren has already started to look at child characters more, I decided to focus more on the adult character, as we are looking at similar things anyway. 

I looked at a few of Tim Burton's characters, in particular 9 from the film 9. I find that he has a very simple yet distinguishable body shape that I'd like to incorporate into my designs, as I feel that it would be easy to work with whist being an effective design. I also looked at Little Big Planet, as it follows a very similar format, with the characters having a very simple body shape with minimal detail. I also quickly looked at Wallace and Gromit and Creature Comforts, as this was an influence we discussed earlier in the week when we were considering an animal-like character. 

Pocoyo was also mentioned earlier in the week whilst we were discussing our ideas and I feel that it is also a simple design, however, he is a human and although he looks very simple, it may not be as easy as it looks to create the facial movements of a similar character. I also decided to look at robots, as this is also a possibility for characters. 

If we were to go down this road, I feel that a character similar to Ben from Treasure Planet would be a better design, as he is made of simple shapes and his joints are very clear, which would make it easier to animate. Finally I looked at an animation called The Maker because I liked how the characters were simple, yet they still worked really well within the story.