Practical character design

For my practical i decided to work on showcasing my question in the form of character design, I focused on the three roles i talked about in my Essay, which are the Hero, Princess and False Hero who play big parts in a story.

The following images show them all together and as indivisuals. each indivisual has been described as their role and what they do in the story, alongside their personalities.

i love the final results of each character as i was trying to use the best  style i have to express each role.

Pulled section of Essay

I pulled out this massive section from my essay because I had a bit off an issue with it. this issue involved testing what I've written to see if it helps the argument or rather theory to prove Propp's character theory, here is the section:

The amount of detail used to convey the characters and background depends on the genre as it helps to represent what the series is all about, one example of a comedy slice of life anime is “Nichijou”, made to look simple with limited detail but is supported by the intense comedy animation sequences to make each sequence very exaggerated with detail, which adds on to the character personality trait. The character personality is easily established allowing the viewer to know how this character is going to react, showcasing the many situations of “Nichijou”(every day like) where the audience can relate to each character's position and can easily identify the expression of the character, thanks to how the animator conveyed the feeling of the character.

There are many sequences that gives the audience a chance to appreciate the animation but one, in particular, is the 4 minutes sequenced called “Nichijou everyday life part 65 (episode 16)”.

We are instantly introduced to 2 main protagonists that are confronted by a policeman looking for someone who is carrying a bag full of counterfeit bills, which one of the main girl protagonists is supposedly holding, and suits the description. She instantly over reacts with guilt causing the other main protagonist to question her friend and comes to the conclusion that it can’t be her, then suddenly the girl holding the bag raises her hands up ready to get cuffed which looks suspicious to the policeman, and her friend starts to overreact but still tries to reason if it truly is her friend, and ends up telling the policeman that “she is getting ready just in case a volleyball comes by” the policeman accepted the reasoning, but within the moment we see her bowing in front of the policeman with what it seems to be a counterfeit bill placed on the ground and therefore makes the policeman really suspicious of this girl. He questioned the girl if it is counterfeit money which she replies with it being real money and a bribe to let her go.

The scene then transitions to the policeman grabbing the bag intensively, opening it up; taking out what’s in the bag which appears to be her yaoi (homosexual) manga/comic, from this we see her start stressing, causing her to unleash her strength that could potential injure somebody. The animation from this point becomes intensive as she strikes the police officer, causing him to throw all the pages in the air, we then see her jumping high in the air to catch each page. As she lands collecting some of the pages, she looks up towards her friend who has one of the pages, with a surprised face as she looks at the comic; causing her to be traumatised allowing for her friend to take advantage, the animation then shows the girl going towards the traumatised friend to perform a wrestling move ending up with her friend slamming the ground and flying in the air as she collects the page, a posh man enters the scene picking up the pages causing him to receive a kick. seconds after, the girl counts how many pages she had collected she noticed a page was missing and it happened to be in the mouth of a goat chewing on the page, causing her to reperform the wrestling move on the goat. The sequence ends with her walking away with a lot of stress caused by the amount of strength she used. (Nichijou Everyday life part 65 (Episode 16), 2011)

As we can see, the animators were able to convey each character emotions and demonstrate the personality traits given to each character, which makes it easy to identify for the audience, I found some reviews that fans of the series have written about this episode.

NICHIJOU EVERYDAY LIFE PART 65 (EPISODE 16)
Your Bibliography: Nichijou Everyday life part 65 (Episode 16). (2011). [video] Japan: Kyoto Animation.

The test involved asking people if they could connect and relate to the character but it seemed like people either got confused at what was happening or they didn't find the intense moments in the animation funny enough. Some pointed out that it is another cultures comedy that only works if you have been exposed to most of it, which really surprised me and completely failed to help with the argument I was presenting, so I had to take it out and replace it with a film that still carries the culture but people can actuly relate to it because its got human asspects.

study task 5: Writing an Introduction

Within this essay I am to explore how animators visually convey character personality traits, I will be researching as to how characters are developed and created in a way to suit their respected personality traits, this will include looking at how characters are thought up through a few processes of gathering ideas and then are produced into the final drawing concepts. My essay will cover the different approaches involved as to how the character is created and then presented in an animation format. As to how the character is representing their traits, there will be further investigations into how animators use different techniques to showcase these traits.

There are various amounts of animations across all genres and styles that give the viewer a way to connect to the character’s personality traits, to discover what makes the viewer feel connected to the character I will find and compare related texts that indicate what goes on for the viewer and the animators. Most of these animations will consist between looking at American, European and Asian animations to compare how they convey a character’s personality trait and whether there is a stereotypical result between the three; from this result, we can correlate whether characters are made from a structure of set rules that all animators accept and follow or are made breaking the set rules as to how the character’s acts.

If the result of animators following a structure of set rules are true, there should be a further reason and research as to why animators convey these certain ways with these set rules. If there is we can determine that there is a structure to making a character, does it mean that the animator can choose to go against these set rules?

My hypothesis behind the role of how animators convey character personality traits is that in order for the animators to create these traits, there will be a lot of planning and referencing to actor’s performances in films. This should provide a theory whether it is possible to convey these traits from a personal or referencing stand point.