This weeks session of Animation Context, was focussed on two things, the first a review of our essay drafts that we created over the weekend and submitted to Turnitin. The second we watched a short documentary named "The Evolution of an Artist Chuck Jones" which described within some of the running gags of the Looney Tunes world and some insight to character design. This was another focus of the session that Johny had in mind a small exercise in character design. When watching the documentary I paid very close attention to see if there was anything I could learn from.
I felt that watching this I was looking back on the past of cartoon animation and I was surprised when it went into the aspect of some of the characters such as Daffy Duck and Wild E Coyote. The trait that runs in some of the gags in the animation assumption and proved wrong, for instance we see Wild E setting a trap which he assumes will work but when it come time to spring the trap he's proven wrong many times when it back fires. This made me consider some elements to character design, and another surprise came as well and that was a characters desire. The video described a characters goals, ambitions and desires such as Daffy's desire is to become rich and be noticed by everyone whilst Bugs Bunny's is just to be left alone and not have Elmer Fudd come after him.
However it also mentioned the disciplines of having restrictions in the characters as it said "the simpler the desire the simple the character" This didn't seem to make any sense to me and I realised this would require further investigating.
Watching the documentary was making me feel like I was learning something new and made me think of many things to associate with in my story telling module for my characters. One thing was clear I still had much to learn about character design and I may want to look into this further. I feel I learned a lot from this documentary and could possibly utilise this.
We then moved to the character design exercise, we were handed work sheets that awfully resembled the sheets that Annabeth handed to us when doing the character description element of our storytelling module. This then brought our attention to a book that Johny recommended called Creative Character Design by Bryan Tillman. This was an element we would be looking at for a module next year. We look at this for the exercise even handing us some pages of the book 28-30. Looking closely at them one aspect caught my attention which described the who, what, when, where, why and how of the character design.
What interest me was the way the text described what to include even showing an example story in using the method. I may look at this later and have a test on using it on one of my characters. This was what actually brought us to our exercise for independent study. The task was to write up a blog post on the documentary followed by using the hand outs to create a character design biography and as an optional activity do a mock up design of the character. This seemed the perfect time to do a character biography on one of my developing characters in my side projects for The Lone Watcher, but I checked with Johny first and he said it would be okay so it would give me a starting point.
Looking back on the session I felt like I would've done things differently. In hindsight I would've talked to Johny about my experience with submitting my Essay draft and see if there was anything that I could improve upon the next time I submit an essay. I would've asked further questions about the session and the exercise to give me further details into what it was I was supposed to do. However this lesson has given me a lot of things to think about for the character design for my Story telling script to screen project.
In future I shall look into this book and see if it can be applied to my other modules be it 102 or storytelling and if the module we have next year is located around character design reading the book ahead of time could be beneficial. I have however learned a lot from this lesson and may build upon it.
I felt that watching this I was looking back on the past of cartoon animation and I was surprised when it went into the aspect of some of the characters such as Daffy Duck and Wild E Coyote. The trait that runs in some of the gags in the animation assumption and proved wrong, for instance we see Wild E setting a trap which he assumes will work but when it come time to spring the trap he's proven wrong many times when it back fires. This made me consider some elements to character design, and another surprise came as well and that was a characters desire. The video described a characters goals, ambitions and desires such as Daffy's desire is to become rich and be noticed by everyone whilst Bugs Bunny's is just to be left alone and not have Elmer Fudd come after him.
However it also mentioned the disciplines of having restrictions in the characters as it said "the simpler the desire the simple the character" This didn't seem to make any sense to me and I realised this would require further investigating.
Watching the documentary was making me feel like I was learning something new and made me think of many things to associate with in my story telling module for my characters. One thing was clear I still had much to learn about character design and I may want to look into this further. I feel I learned a lot from this documentary and could possibly utilise this.
We then moved to the character design exercise, we were handed work sheets that awfully resembled the sheets that Annabeth handed to us when doing the character description element of our storytelling module. This then brought our attention to a book that Johny recommended called Creative Character Design by Bryan Tillman. This was an element we would be looking at for a module next year. We look at this for the exercise even handing us some pages of the book 28-30. Looking closely at them one aspect caught my attention which described the who, what, when, where, why and how of the character design.
What interest me was the way the text described what to include even showing an example story in using the method. I may look at this later and have a test on using it on one of my characters. This was what actually brought us to our exercise for independent study. The task was to write up a blog post on the documentary followed by using the hand outs to create a character design biography and as an optional activity do a mock up design of the character. This seemed the perfect time to do a character biography on one of my developing characters in my side projects for The Lone Watcher, but I checked with Johny first and he said it would be okay so it would give me a starting point.
Looking back on the session I felt like I would've done things differently. In hindsight I would've talked to Johny about my experience with submitting my Essay draft and see if there was anything that I could improve upon the next time I submit an essay. I would've asked further questions about the session and the exercise to give me further details into what it was I was supposed to do. However this lesson has given me a lot of things to think about for the character design for my Story telling script to screen project.
In future I shall look into this book and see if it can be applied to my other modules be it 102 or storytelling and if the module we have next year is located around character design reading the book ahead of time could be beneficial. I have however learned a lot from this lesson and may build upon it.
Comments
Post a Comment