Character Development Update

I feel that I am nearly complete in familiarizing myself with the character I’m developing now. The character is a cat, named Jitters. He pities humans because he thinks cat’s are the superior species, but he has a soft spot for them. He likes his own space, and when other encroach on it he slowly and subtly stretches his body our really far to claim space. He likes to sleep a lot and gets annoyed at being woken. He doesn’t like to be stroked without permission and hates water. He has an enemy in the form of the cat across the street and is generally quite secluded and un-social. He’s a bit of a snob and thinks a lot of himself. He hates water, loves flowers, and sees humans as his ‘servants’. I have been observing my own cat all week and taking photos, and then developing them into still cartoon like images just to brainstorm ideas of liked activities and places, and yesterday I fully created each body component. The brief stresses the importance of personality rather than appearance, but I plan to show personality mainly through postures and facial expressions. Now I am researching some classic body postures and expressions of humans and what they indicate for cats and humans, and am merging the two to create a ‘language board’ for my character that I can reference when storyboarding my animation. I have been thinking of ideas for the animation all week but have not decided yet, as I have felt it more important to develop the character’s personality, style and ‘language’. I will finish this by Monday and then give myself a day to write a treatment for the animation itself, which should be easy to do now that the characters personality and style has been determined, and another day to produce a storyboard, and then I will begin to create the components and think about how to produce the sound. I hope to be ready to start production of the animation itself, with all components ready and set up in after effects by Friday, and then will begin to animate next week. (This week I will be doing a lot of work for Client Proposal Project)