During the animation study practices, we achieved many animation exercises, for me, the core aspect is around the design and practice of one character.
When I started my initial practice of bouncing character, I began to consider that I need a animated character to help me achieve the practice in subsequent exercises. Thus, I started with the basic of character movement, beginning a design of my own character.
Initially, I try to design a cute character, so I add some of animal features such as fox ears, a white skirt, and a small tall, and I also keep the proportions around two heads tall, searching some similar references to help me design this character and drawing some silhouettes base on these references to help me adjust the geometric relationship of the character’s appearance.
After getting the basic version, I started to design the different color scheme for this character. Among then, I particularly like the combination of green and light red as the “normal color scheme, and choice it as my final color scheme. And then, I created some actions and facial expression designs for my character. With these foundational settings, I get a lively image of a little girl character with fox-like features.
In the subsequent design phase, the teachers requested us to design a reasonable plot and background story. Initially, I thought it is very hard to create a story, which made me feel very challenging. In the initial design, I merely envisioned her as an ordinary girl living the city, and she will encounter various interesting events on her way to school every day. However, after I completed my first draft of the story, I felt it lacked some depth and failed to resonate well with my previous character design elements (such as the tails and ears). I wanted to make the story more vivid, so I started to think what kind of themes can interested me and align with the character.
I started to search references and recalled some works I had seen before, such as ‘ Song of the sea’ ‘ the wolf walker’, which made me realize that the humans versus nature maybe can be a suitable theme. Thus, I designed a warm world basic on the magical forest fore this cute character. In this world, this little fox girl lives as a sprite in the forest, but I didn’t want to write a purely harmonious story, so I introduced some conflict elements—humans. The conflicts between humans and forest creatures is a common topic in the animation world, in these stories, most of humans always seek to obtain or exploit resources to meet their needs, which causes the happen of conflicts finally. In my story, this trigger is a kind of magical firefly found in the forest. It is able to heal human’s diseases, and the little fox girl, as a guardian of the forest will protect them. This conflict forms the basic of the story. As for profound meanings or metaphors, we can address them later, just like the base color of an oil painting, the story has a basic framework, which is enough for me at this stage.
fter completing all of this, a simple preliminary character design was accomplished. I like this cute character, and with her, I began to design a series of basic animation movements, such as walking and jumping. I even experimented with different proportions to see if they would bring new feeling, resulting in final images depicted below, I very like them.
