DEVELOPMENT OF MY CHARACTER

The design of the characters personality rather than visual appearance is strongly emphasised in the brief, and I have been focussing on this in my research, looking at acting techniques for familiarizing yourself with characters, writing tips for developing characters (one of these is to leave naming a character until the end so you don’t have any name association limiting your creativity, I experimented with this in idea generation and found it works better for me to not have a name. The character is based on my cat however, who is called Pepper, and this has been a working title to avoid confusion when discussing different characters), and non-verbal ways of communication for expressing personality traits. Based on my research, I have come up with the following ideas of redeveloping my characters personality:


* I am going to research iconic cat characters and study what makes them unique and what they all have in common. This is to ensure that my character does all the right things, and also to make me aware of what has been done that is unique to each character, so I can strive to do something a little different and give my own character a sense of unique identity. I will start out looking at silent cartoon cats, and this will allow me to also pay attention to ways of communicating without dialogue.

• I will observe my pet Pepper and making notes and images that portray unique mannerisms and ideas for characterization.

• I will come up with a new name, based on the character personality.


• I will develop a visual style for the characters appearance, based not solely on the personality, but also on a comment made in the brief; ‘styles that will work within the commercial and music industry’

• I will keep a scrapbook of images of the characters life that will depict rough images of the characters habitat, friends, belongings and lifestyle.

• FINALLY, I will fill out the character questionnaire I composed previously and also include a list of bodily mannerisms and postures, as a sort of reference profile that sums up who my character is, and be referred to when considering how the character would behave in certain situations. This will aid me in developing a treatment for the animation and storyboard.

• Once the character has been developed, I will familiarize myself with it by adopting the personality in second life and seeing if it offers any inspiration for animation ideas.