A Practice in Personifying Abstract Concepts.
The last posts have been building the theoretical foundations for the exercise to come, and the designer and researcher Minh Ha has done all the hardwork for us. Now, after reading this post and the previous ones you’ll be better equiped to explore the world of character development in animation.
See it as a kind of therapy, think of an emotion or feeling you’re experiencing and try and visualise it using the techniques Minh goes through below.
To begin this article, I would like to return to the central goal of my research, namely to create characters from abstract concepts for a short animated film. This post will detail how this research was utilised in my own practice with the acquired knowledge from previous chapters on designing personifications.
As noted at the end of chapter 2, ‘context’ plays a big part in determining the character; they need to blend into, or stick out of the environment they are going to appear in, depending on the intention of the plot. For the creation of my characters, the former is more applicable.
My short film’s context will be quite similar to Inside Out in that all the major events that occur during the film are metaphors of the thinking process within the human mind. The setting is that of a hospital, with patients that are personifications of basic human needs. In this post, I will describe my attempt to visualise three of the patient characters.
The first character I would like to address is Hunger. The “hunger” concept here is not to be understood as a type of scourge that may readily result in death; it is simply an everyday need to fill one’s stomach. From internet image searches, I have seen that “hunger” is not a widely personified concept, if not very rare. Therefore, I decided to adopt the same design process utilised in Inside Out: start from basic shapes. In motion picture, the most common way to signify hunger is through a growling stomach, thus I settled on the shape of a stomach as a starting point.
The stomach, when simplified, looks like a bean with the lower end sharper than the upper one. If you imagine the oesophagus as the neck and the duodenum as the legs, then we have the image of a hunched person with a contracting belly. This goes very well with his behaviour, which I plan to portray as being “always hungry”. His empty stomach causes him to hunch over, and makes him look up to other people like he is begging for food. Naturally, he is skinny. His hands, when not doing anything in particular, are always on his tummy.
For the next character, the idea is Sleep. When one thinks of sleep, the image of the bed comes to mind. But the bed has a rather complex shape and consists of several components. Therefore I will use another object that is simpler and closely related to the idea of sleep: the pillow. The basic shape of a pillow is a square or rectangle with curved lines that bend slightly outward from the centre. The corners could be rounded instead of square angles, but it is not necessary.
This pillow shape, when transitioned to a human body, resembles a man with a rotund girth. To go with this body type, I have added two stumpy legs and two flabby, elongated arms. For a character who just wants to sleep and do nothing else, this design is quite appropriate. He suffers from insomnia, however, and has not slept a long time. Because of that, his eyes look dazed with two layers of bags below them, his mouth is drooling, and his hair is a mess.
The last concept to design is Friendship. This is a more challenging task than designing the previous two, because the imagery closely associated with the concept of ‘friendship’ is not easy to turn into simple shapes. After much consideration, I decided to use the heart shape as base for this character, for it is a symbol of affection, and friendship needs a certain level of affection.
When moulded into a human frame, the heart shape actually makes for a very robust and healthy torso. This is likely to look out of place in a hospital setting, so I have to tone down the volume of the heart and make it look thinner. It should still look like a heart, though. This character will be a bit more athletic than the previous two, but as long as he does not look like a bodybuilder, I believe it should be fine. He will run around a lot in the film, in any case. Personality-wise, he wants friendship so much he’s literally crazy about it, and he shows it by running around the hospital and hugging anyone he sees.
Prior to writing this chapter, I have made a few character designs as prototype, however I did not start from basic shapes and visualised them as human characters from the beginning. As a result, these characters turned out rather generic. Although certain elements of their design show the original abstract concept, they appear shallow because they lack base. For this same reason, I was unable to visualise a few other characters because I did not know what to add or remove to make them related to their concepts.
By starting from basic shapes, the process becomes much easier. In addition to that, I feel that the characters express their underlying concepts significantly better on a more subtle level. This is especially important for a short film where characters only have brief screentime, and the action can only say so much about a character.
Overall, I am very satisfied with how these characters turned out. Following this thesis, I am going to re-imagine the rest of the cast using the same character design procedure. While it might be more difficult than my previous method, it will ensure that my characters have depth as well as design unity.
I am aware that there are other characters that represent a wide range of personified concepts, and that their design process will pose different difficulties. While the numerous preceding personifications allow for a surplus of reference material, the main issue lies in the artist’s ability to find the balance between tradition and creativity. As we have seen from the analysis of Death personifications in chapter 2, the creativity part can be limitless, however it is important that the audience can recognise the concepts beneath all the fancy design. Because my final product will have neither narrative nor dialogue, I expect my design to contain a fair amount of reference from preceding personifications so that the viewers can better identify the characters for what they are.
In Conclusion.
When designing characters from abstract concepts for use in motion picture, there are two important things to consider. The first is the context of the movie itself. No matter how these characters are designed, they need to give a feeling that they are part of the world in which they exist, and what they do is appropriate as the movie genre demands. Thus, it is essential to know what kind of story you intend to make, how the characters are going to be introduced and what their roles are within that story.
The second thing is how these characters are going to be perceived by viewers. If the concept already has an established image, then it is a good idea to follow the standards set by such image so that the audience can relate to it more easily, while putting in creativity wherever possible. If you are personifying an abstract concept from the ground up, proper knowledge of the character design process is a must, and you have to focus everything around the concept as you go.
Thanks to the knowledge gained from this research, I am now well prepared for the task of designing characters for my short film. While they are but one element among many that would determine the result of the entire project, being able to properly create engaging characters will undoubtedly give me assurance and encouragement to do well on the other parts as well. I believe my project will be a success.
Minh Ha graduated from the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology with a bachelor’s degree and is currently working on his master’s degree at the same school. His tentative MA thesis topic is related to environmental issues; particularly looking at how virtual reality can recreate the experiences and negative effects of the Anthropocene epoch.
Ha also works as a video editor for AZA Group. His interests lie in 2D animation but he’s just begun to expand into 3D, particularly with Unreal Engine.
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