Tuesday, 9 February 2016

Character Development Feedback

Silent Crit
A group crit, where the individual presenting their work doesn't speak and the rest of the group is left to look through and feed back on the work.
I found silent critting really difficult when I did it for the Editorial brief (Vis Skills) because I had a concept that was quite complex and my peers didn't quite get my intention without me being able to answer their questions.

Silent Crits worked much better for this task as character designs should be pretty self-explanatory.
The purpose of the crits was to record the responses of my peers to the characters I have produced.



I'm so happy with the feedback I recieved today!
They loved the bat drawings. Why? Because they were cute. 'Cute' isn't what I was aiming for, and that's partly why I changed direction onto the Fibres. Even though I don't really want to go too cute, I guess I should follow what my peers are saying and incorporate some more batty, creature of the night elements! THE CLIENT IS ALWAYS RIGHT.

They understood my intentions for the Fibres and got lots of EW for the grossness of these characters. They especially liked how they worked as a family/set. A lot of my peers are struggling to decide on three characters to choose that would go together as a series because they've done individual character designs while I made a big family.

Joe's drawings are beautiful and I'm intrigued to see how they translate into GIFs. No one on our table has ventured into GIFland yet, so we're going to dive in tonight and just make SOMETHING animated. ANYTHING.




Media
I explained my idea for using gouache to paint the hand drawn character and making a posable model for 3D. Jamie said to consider which one to take forward into 3D because body movements might be easier to articulate with such a model (pose-able limbs) whereas more complex facial expressions might be harder and better to do in digital/hand drawn. GOOD POINTS!

Sophia had a really cool idea to make a girl with a scarf and hair moving in the wind. She's done some great drawings but has limited her 3D work to just paper layered up, so I suggested that she uses real material on the scarf, because nothing can mimic that fluidity as well as the real thing.

Several of the roughs I saw in my crit had used wind/hair flowing. I hadn't thought about hair moving! There are so many little details of the body that you forget aren't static! We're in costant motion even when we're still. Hairs wisp, mouths twitch, veins pump. DON'T FORGET THE LITTLE DETAILS.

Ending today with a baby bat yeee.

Moving Forward
Get making!
Use Scrat, Mite, Snot and/or Snore! Make them some backgrounds.
Make a timetable. I like autonomous weeks because I am quite self-motivated but I do find it incredibly overwhelming to set off with a week's worth of work to tackle and having little support to guide me. I need to address my concerns before I get to Monday and have a solid plan for what I'm going to get up to each day so that I don't run out of time.

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