Floyd Bishop

After showing someone some character animation I have been working on, I was asked “Where do you get your ideas?”

My answer was “all over the place”.

Jillian Tamaki had a recent post where she talks a bit about the process she goes through in regards to idea generation. I thought it might be worthwhile to talk a bit about what goes through my head when approaching a character for the first time.

When I get a character to work on that has no animation done before hand, it’s exciting and scary all at the same time. You are defining this character, and making it appear that he/she/it is living for themselves. My process is basically the same as Ollie Johnston’s “What is the character thinking, and why does he feel that way?” Also, “Would anyone other than your mother want to watch it?”

While many animators tend to draw from literary sources, either comic, book, television, or film driven, I try to tie characters in to other people I have known or met in the past. If I cannot come up with one, only then do I start to look over other media sources.

Here is Tina Fey talking a bit about how she arrived at her take on Sarah Palin:

She goes beyond simple observation, and starts to draw in other sources to build up her charactertured version of a real person. When you are animating, you have to be able to do the same thing, creating a stew of resources to draw upon to create a performance that is new, yet familiar at the same time.

Sometimes I’ll work on a character, starting with what he or she would like to eat, and then go from there. What does he eat for breakfast? Does he eat a large, balanced breakfast, or does he slurp down bad coffee on his commute in to a job he hates? Little things like that help to define a character, and can really help flesh them out for an audience or player (in the case of games).

Keep your eyes and ears open at all times, and make mental notes of things you encounter in every day life. You never know when they might help you animate something later on.

-Floyd Bishop