How to Give Life to an Abstract Concept?
We all know how frustrating it can be when we can’t think of the right words at the right time. So how we express ourselves and communicate with each other is one of the most important aspects of our lives; and the ability to give form to an emotion or convery an abstract concept is a skill worth learning!
With this in mind and carrying on from last week’s theory takeover we will be publishing excerpts from designer and researcher Minh Ha’s thesis. Below you will discover how abstract concepts can be personified.
So what if you are trying to personify an abstract concept that has no prominent preceding visual image?
We will try to find an answer to this question by taking a look at the movie Inside Out(dir. Pete Docter, 2015).This movie is, quite literally, an elaborate visualisation of the mind of an eleven-year-old named Riley. The plot revolves around personifications of Riley’s emotions, namely Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, as they go on a journey to help Riley as she goes through a crisis in her life.
According to the art director, Albert Lozano, the design for these personifications first started from basic shapes (Giardina, 2015). During one of the scenes in the movie, the characters go into a room where they get ‘abstracted’, losing their complexity until they are nothing more than a star, a cone and a teardrop.
“I was really just taking the design process and going backwards to where we started, thinking of them as simple shapes. At the end, Joy had to be a star and Sadness a teardrop,” said Lozano.
In addition, one of the steps to sketch the character Anger, demonstrated by Ronnie Del Carmen, co-director of the movie, is to “start by drawing a square” (Nemiroff, 2015). We can assume that the rest of the main cast in the “mind world” are all designed from basic shapes as well.
Starting from the simplest shapes is a fundamental technique in designing cartoon characters, and choosing the right shape from the beginning is crucial to bringing out the essence of the character. For Joy who represents happiness, it is a star, a shape often seen in joyous moments in cartoon such as during Christmas or when a fairy weaves her spell. For Sadness whose name is the emotion she stands for, the shape is appropriately a teardrop. Similarly, Anger’s basic shape is a square (or brick), Fear is drawn from a nerve, and Disgust is based on a broccoli.
From these shapes, the designers went on to flesh out the characters using certain stereotypes. For example, Sadness has the overall look of a shut-in: overweight, nerdy glasses, and stuffy clothes, while Anger is given a clerk’s suit, implying at the everyday stress that workers face. Joy gets a simple dress and a slightly messy hairstyle for the free-spirited girl that she is, but there is one extra thing that makes her stand out from the rest: she glows. This could be seen as a metaphor that happiness was Riley’s main emotion throughout her life until the point of the movie (although the true reason behind it was not quite that complicated).
Personality-wise, these characters primarily exhibit the emotion they represent through their dialogue and behaviour, although they are capable of other emotions as well. Joy is generally bright and cheerful, and is incapable of understanding sadness — at first. Sadness has a tendency to become depressed and not wanting to do anything. Anger is easily agitated and has a crude and straightforward way of thinking when it comes to problem-solving. Fear always imagines the worst scenarios, and Disgust almost never approves.
All of these sound simple when everything is said and done, but back when the movie was still in its earliest stages, designing the emotions as characters was the most difficult thing in the process of making the movie, as documented in an article written by Tom May (2015). Some characters were immediate hits, others went through many drafts before finalisation. Another astounding fact is that the original cast of personifications was much larger, but only five made it to the final product. There was an extensive screening process, and a lot of trial and error.
I have had the chance to watch the movie myself, and from a viewer’s perspective, the characters are all very relative to the concepts they stand for. While its primary target audience is children and thus it wastes no time in introducing the characters through narration, older and more sophisticated viewers can still appreciate the connection between the character design and the initial concepts. The carefully constructed appearances, along with the use of colours associated with emotions, such as blue for sadness or red for anger, gave way to a set of original and attractive cast. Although I think the movie places a bit too much focus on Joy and Sadness, especially Joy who is kind of a “team leader” figure and the other emotions seem to be unable to help Riley without her, I still find the whole team likeable because of the equal amount of efforts put into their designs.
In summary, personifying an abstract concept is not an easy process. While there is no boundary to creativity, one must pay attention to how the concept is represented through the character, with regard to the context. Having preceding visualisations of the concept that are developed through the course of history is a great advantage as it helps the audience recognise the concept and accept the design more easily, however it can also be a detriment in that it diminishes the character’s uniqueness. When designing a character for an already established concept such as Death, it is most important to find the right balance between formula and creativity. For less-established concepts, it is arguably harder, but a good understanding of the character design process as well as the concept itself will help in finding the correct approach and avoiding too much trial and error.
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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