Inspiration - MAF

During my visit to Manchester Animation Festival, I saw many shorts, all of which were extremely inspiring. However, there were two that stood out for me when it came to simplistic yet effective character design.

The first of which was:

"A Self Compassion Exercise" Directed by Joe Bichard. The purpose behind this animation, was to remind people that there is a lot of pressure from all areas of life, and that we often forget to take a step back and realise that the goals we try to achieve are sometimes very high. It stressed the importance of self-care & self-compassion, and remembering that it takes time to get where we want to be.

Aside from this, the other aspect which made this animation stick with me, was the simplistic character design. The lack of colour & simple line work was really effective & sort of reiterated the idea of not stressing over things allowing the simple things to work their magic. This is what encouraged me to avoid designing characters for this film that would be over complex.

Another animation that really influenced my thoughts on character design was "Birdz" which was Directed by Emelien Davaud. 

The story behind this animation was unlike anything else I had previously seen, with it's harsh yet realistic representation of how birds live & actually how this is in some ways similar to how humans live. 

I loved the character designs in this animation, because they were so human like but also at the same time so odd. One of the features that stood out to me the most was the arched noses. To me this made the characters look a little unnerving & I liked the effect this had. This gave me the idea of designing characters, all of which with a consistent attribute like this. Allowing the character to be compatible with one another, but also making them slightly strange.