Designing for Animation (Is Hard)

Developing visual design for animation has its own very specific challenges unique to the genre, something I have discovered having recently been assigned as art director on our live brief project. My initial set of designs I thought to be most visually appealing were not suitable for animation, they only seemed to work from the few angles I had drew them from and it was difficult to imagine how they might move. My team members also voiced concerns about the amount of unnecessary detail of the characters considering the time limit we had. At the time I found this frustrating because I didn't see any issue with these designs but in retrospect they were not at all suitable and I spent too much time fighting that rather than fixing it.

So I went back to the drawing board and altered the designs to simplify the shapes and remove unnecessary details. But I think it went to far into the opposite direction and we landed on bland characterless designs. Which forced me to change how I was thinking about my design philosophy for project, although at this point it was too little too late and we had to stick with the lack luster designs.

So with that in mind I'm spending time focusing on designing characters for my third year pitch. I've been looking at the art of Andrew MacLean for inspiration, he is a comic book artist but I think his art would be perfect for animation. As you can see to the left his art style is very graphic, with geometric shapes that are easy to identify, he uses shorthand when the characters are at distant such as faces boiled down to main elements. I think his use of the lines within some characters may be excessive for animation but I've been using his designs as a point of reference when designing my own characters.







Compare his face in the image below to the own above, he doesn't depict as much detail at a distance because the necessary visual information is still conveyed just with less lines, which is a more economic approach for animation.