Toolkit 2: Character Design: Session 2

This week's character design session had us being given an existing film franchise to make a character out of. I was given Monsters Inc., and started out by looking at some of the more prominent characters within the film to get a basic understanding of the shapes used in their designs.

I ended up taking some notes on this page as well as I considered the following; 

• It's a Disney film, typically aimed at a much younger audience and families
• There are lots of designs in which the shapes underneath are obvious; for example, Sulley is made mostly of squares and Mike is made from circular shapes. These tend to be rounded off overall, however, since these characters are meant to be friendlier. 
• There is a lot of contrast between smaller and bigger creatures.
• Lots of bright colours are used.
• Some of the monsters seem to incorporate or be vaguely based off of animals, for example, Randall is very lizard-like and has the ability to blend in with his surroundings in the same fashion as a chameleon.
• Extra limbs and eyes are common features. Horns, wings, and claws are also used fairly often.
• These types of monsters, due to their jobs being that of scaring children, look somewhat like creatures that children would draw or at least be afraid of. 
• The style also seems to have a habit of making the characters' eyes (if they have multiple) sit rather close together on the face - the only time this doesn't seem to be the case is with Randall and to a lesser extent Waternoose. Both of these characters are villains. 

We then had to make our own characters and try to make them fit into this franchise. I struggled a lot with this and ended up spending a while talking to Justin about it since the variety in character design was so large.

We then moved on to looking at our personal projects and combining this with the franchise we'd just been looking at. We had to select a specific character or character and combine them with one of the 'conceits' of our personal character design project. I looked briefly at Sulley and the 'vinyl toys' and '1930's/1940's' aspect of the prompts I'd been given, deciding to incorporate the stiffness of the toys and the overall rounded shapes found within them. I also started to consider how the face and smaller details would work, since on older vinyl toys, a lot of these are painted or drawn on rather than their own individual features.

In the afternoon, we moved solely onto our personal design projects. I spent a long time discussing the 'vinyl toy' aspect of this with Justin as I was having issues finding commonalities between what I'd found in my research and linking the prompt back to the 'gangster' concept. We decided that there were quite a few routes I could go down since we managed to find a larger variety of vinyl toys that weren't limited simply to dolls, but the issue remains that the shapes on the dolls and toys themselves are a limitation since they're very stiff and not very malleable.

It seemed to be that I was going to have two or three distinct types of characters including the gangster character, a femme-fatale type, and a possible hero that rallies against the more villainous characters. 

There were lots of other things that I had to consider as well that I made notes on;

• Vintage branding for vinyl toys in the 1930's/40's has a very specific appeal to it that could be used for the environment itself, and that the environment should be made up of a vinyl-plastic-type material and I shouldn't restrict myself to just the one material (I would just have to make sure not to deviate too far and keep vinyl as the main one). 
• There were some types of older vinyl toys that had some kind of articulation, but a lot of the characters could still follow the typically stiff and not very flexible appearance. Instead, the main characters could be the ones that have more articulation since they have more to do in comparison to background characters which do not.
• Since there was also an extremely large significance in vinyl toys being animals (some cartoony, some not), there is also the potential for these characters to become anthropomorphised. For example, when looking around for my research, there were two particular types of toys that stood out to me; a set of boxer dog vinyl toys and some vinyl toys that were cats. If I chose to go down this route, I spoke to Justin about having the gangster character look like some kind of tougher, intimidating dog character in contrast to a sleeker femme-fatale cat-like design.
• There was also a lot of dolls that were based off of babies and young children. If I was going to go for a contrast against the prompt, there is the potential for me to have a gangster character or a femme-fatale character based off of a baby doll since it would be largely unexpected.