No. 174, Designing on the Fly

In feature animation production, the storyboard artists are not required to stay too much on model with the characters. As long as one can tell what character it is, and if expressions and body language are conveyed, a character may be drawn roughly and loosely.  For them, the important things are staging and camera viewpoint and clarity of action.

The independent animation film maker who is doing everything himself will sometimes design a character during the storyboarding process. In such a case, it is equally okay to be a bit careless about details and accuracy, because the character design is still fluid.

By the time real animation begins, however, it is well to have a model sheet made up.  I have a good example of that here.

I have a number of short scenes featuring these two characters, and I intend to animate all the scenes  as a group. This is a good way to minimize a tendency to keep on designing as the work goes along; if I were to do one scene in the group now and another six months later, there would be a likelihood that I might have trouble getting the character to look the same.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows a collage of storyboard images of the two characters I am calling Ben and Bev.  They are male and female security personnel at the airport, in charge of moving people through the luggage X-ray process.  Here, Ben's images are more consistent than those of Bev, whose hair style keeps changing through the sequence's storyboard.

Figure 2

In Figure 2, I have retraced all the images from Figure 1, plus many more from a second sheet, working to make consistent all the details and proportions as I drew. The result is a model sheet that will definitely help me to keep these characters in line for all of their scenes.