Since I had the role of character designing which Hayley suggested, I decided to first experiment a little bit with the style of our characters. I do not have much experience with character designing, because I am usually the type of person to want to do motion graphics or something completely digital, so I knew this would be a big challenge for me, not just to make a set of characters to turn into plasticine, but also to make characters for someone else to work from. From the seminars I have been to that talk about working in groups for pre-production, it is important to have clear designs which are easy to work from, that are interesting, but effortless to interpret, so I knew there was some pressure. This pressure though, only made me want to try harder.
I began with experimenting with the pigs that Hayley and I are going to have in our animation. There were so many styles to experiment with. I went from trying to use one line to make a whole design, to using extremely rounded shapes and soft edges to make a more minimalistic design. I looked at designing a very wrinkly pig, to a baby pig, thinking of all the different characteristics that we could possible mould in the future. This was a lot of fun for me to do, which surprised me, because I was completely out of my comfort zone. Perhaps trying styles I have never achieved before allowed me to think even further outside the box in terms of how far we can take this animation, but it also made me realise that character designing is not that bad, and my designs were actually alright considering I am relatively new to character designing.
I then wanted to do some more experimenting, and I went with designing the cow. I found this to be extremely difficult because of all the crevices and details that are more prominent on a cow than on for example a pig. They are much larger and generally a lot more powerful, so I tried to get this bold impression across in my designs. I think weight had a lot to do with how to portray the strength of the cow, so I tried to make my characters large and hefty, so that instantly you can tell that the cow has a lot of strength. I experimented with patterns here also, some with blotches immediately obvious in association with a cow, and some more stylistic so that Hayley and I could possibly try and make using different materials.
Hayley sent me some ideas of other animals we could possibly incorporate, for example, chickens, birds, rats, rabbits, etc, so I did some more sketches of these before I went into finalising the designs. I tried to keep these designs very minimalistic, as after showing Hayley what I had done, she said she wanted the characters to be round and easy to shape, which is fair enough considering we will have to make a good few animals for our documentary. Mike suggested we think about experimenting with other materials and mediums such as paper, cardboard, etc, to see if stylistically it will be better for us. I would love to try this because I think it could be a new opportunity for us to try something different but I think Hayley's heart is set on plasticine so either way, it will be something new for me!
Therefore after doing a lot of experimenting, I went ahead and added some colour to my designs. Because we will be talking about the effects of climate change on farm animals, to make this topic seem more interesting and inviting to families, I made the colour scheme bright and appealing. I wanted to make audiences feel like the documentary will be worth watching so I wanted it to catch eyes with vivid colours. I also stuck to making the characters round and easy to mould because Hayley's advice seemed necessary, and overall I think I could be able to work from these.
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