The process of character creation might sound easy to some, but it’s really not. There are several things we have to keep in mind while creating characters for our videos:
1 – Will it fit the script?
2 – Will the client agree with how we think it should look like?
3 – What outfit will he wear? How about the colors and props?
The only way to answer all this questions and create an appropriate character for our videos is going through the sketch process first.For this post will be using the characters we created for the Onsight explainer video as an example.
The first character we designed was Matthew AKA “The Boss”. We started sketching the head and face expressions first (as we always do) and this is how the process looked like:
After we were happy with how the head looked we started sketching the body shape and outfit colors:
After we felt comfortable with how the character looked it was time to make a more detailed version of how the character would look in the animation:
“This looks really good! Let’s send it to the client for approval.” Well, we are glad we did cause the client thought it did look great buuuuuuut too old compared with what they had in mind. Nevertheless that’s how they wanted it to look so they just asked for a younger version of the character. This is what we sent them back, and it was immediately approved as Matthew, the office boss:
After the look and feel of the main character was approved we didn’t need to sketch the remaining characters, we just did the final rendered version for each one of them and sent them for approval. This is how the character sheet looked like once we finished with the design process:
To see how the final video looks please click the following link:
And just to finish this post…
An old scan of how “Bob” the alien was sketched and presented to the client:
And you can see this video HERE