Week 2 - Shape Language

All work completed this week has gone towards the design of my two main characters within my film. Although I had already created designs for these characters, and applied them to my storyboards and animatic, I have gone back to refine the characters, and approach them through a different angle. I have redesigned the characters, applying a more obvious consideration for shape language. To begin, I began research into shape language, and saw that every character starts off as a simple shape, and is built up from that. A few examples using the characters of Tomm Moore, Mary Blair and Chuck Jones are below.

As you can see from these examples, the characters are made up of a mixture of the three basic shapes of a square, circle, and triangle. Last Year, when I first designed my characters, I was conscious of using basic shapes within their designs. The Orphan is a circle on a small square, and the Old Man is a huge oval. However, I built up from this and drew the characters away from these shapes. For this task, I will take the two characters back to these basic shapes, and try not to overcomplicate the designs. I began by sketching out the shapes of the characters, and planned out how their designs would fit into these shapes.  

I tried to keep the original shapes of the characters, but simplified them down further. I have also created designs with caricature  the different shapes to various degrees. For instance I have created designs which feature more squared edges, and those with more spherical qualities. My six designs are 

displayed below. 

The Orphan

The Old Man