Character Design and Concept

Throughout my years at University and in my spare time, I have learned and improved on how to design characters, both in a physical sense and giving the character a personality to help with animation. In this page you can see many character concepts, character turnarounds, character sketches and more.

These are character concepts that I created for different projects in my university across two years. One of these projects I fully completed while the other was a pitch for the final year films. I will explain their creation and the inspiration behind each design.

Second year film: Creature of the night

For this project, we were asked to select a piece of text provided to us and then create characters and stories around it. I chose the text about meeting a creature and created these two characters based around it. I followed the base text when it comes to the story but have the encounter become somewhat friendly instead of showering in mystery. I wanted to create a dynamic friendship between to two characters while still keeping an atmosphere of unsureness and confusion of the creature

Character construction Sheets

Character dynamic Sketches

Since this character is supposed to be a nervous but kind character, I made sure to make sketches that reflected both of these traits. The inspiration for this character was a mixture of a general adventure character mixed with anxiety, mainly to help contrast against the other character's personality which is a lot more fierce.

The creature character for this film is a lot more aggressive and has a bit more of an attitude than the human character, which is more due to her backstory of being abandoned. She is also a fierce fighter so I wanted to show that in some of the sketches here. Her design is a lot more complicated than my human character so while it was more difficult, I did have a lot of fun when sketching her.

Character turnarounds

When it comes to design, I wanted the characters to look very different from each other to help further push their personalities. The human character has duller colours, since that is what rangers would normally wear. It helps to push that he is a normal person and that he is adaptable to nature as he wears appropriate clothing. The creature character was inspired by the night, I wanted the character to have a night look to her while still standing out and looking bizarre. She is a combination of different animals such as a cat, Porcupine, falcon and wasp. She needed to blend in with the darkness around her but I thought having bright coloured areas that glowed would be a nice aspect to add to her weird look.

Third year film pitch: Hotel Run

For this project, I had to create a pitch for the third year films that my animation class was going to create as our final piece. I had created high concept art as well as thumbnails. I was inspired by my family member's old job and this was based around a true story. I wanted to do something new with this film, with anthropomorphic animals as that is something I had not tried up to this point and wanted to give it a go.

Character turnarounds

Character versions

When it comes to design, I wanted the characters to have different body types as that was something I noticed in my previous project so I wanted to change that for this project. I also wanted to try different colour palettes before settling on the ones for the pitch. I wanted to make the shorter character a lot more formal than the taller character, which is why i made sure to do some research on formal attire and general office wear, it also help show the characters personalities with the short of the two being more serious about his job while the taller one was more happier to go at his on pace.

High Concept Art