| Stereotypes While this term is generally frowned upon in society, we in the animation industry use it to make a character easily readable for the audience. The hero is usually always handsome, the villain, repulsively ugly and the female heroine beautiful. The sidekick is almost always goofy looking or extremely cute. These types of designs allow you to instantly recognize the characters traits without adding a bunch of subplot to the cartoon to explain why the character is the way they are. This is very important due to the high budget and time consumed in animating the scenes required. The overall flow of the plot may also suffer because we’re spending too much time on something that doesn’t really need to be told if the character was a stereotype. This is especially true if you’re working on a shorter film of 10 minutes or less. Lets take the assignment that you are working on now and go through some of the characters and see what we can come up with. MAFIA HITMAN This guy can have a couple of different types of looks. He could be the big huge guy who’s seen a lot of fights and maybe had his nose broken a few times. In order to stay tough, he’s had to lift weights or do some kind of training like a boxer would. He’d have a very thick neck and a big strong jaw maybe with an over bite. He could have high cheek bones, small close set eyes, with bags under them. Very heavy brows with bushy eyebrow hairs. Maybe bald or slicked back hair or maybe a brush cut. You could give him a fedora hat like a gangster that sits forward on his head to almost cover his eyes. He could have cauliflower ears from getting hit there so many times. Maybe give him a scar on the cheek or across the nose from a knife fight. Another option would be to make him thin an weasel like. A scrawny guy who’s had to scrape through his life. He has sharp pointy features, long hooked nose, squinty eyes, small mouth with a sharp moustache. Very thin, long eyebrows. Think of ways to maybe combine these two together to get a totally different character. |
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