Wanna Know How to Make an Animation Character? Then this article for you, When the movie COCO won the Oscar, I just sat down to watch it. And I liked Miguel so much that I watched it twice more. And what happens if you like it, it keeps spinning in your head for a long time. As I went around, I thought that we should also write beautiful characters like Miguel and Mama Coco. But how does a character become so funny and fascinating?
When we start to see from the inside of watching the movie, when we start to feel the character, we understand that the writer-director almost always builds the character according to some formulas. Let’s see what those formulas are!
The goal Should Be Clear
The main character of a film must have a clear goal. And the character will create events or proceed from events in order to fulfill that goal. If he doesn’t have a purpose, or if he has a purpose but it’s not clear to the audience, then the audience may lose interest in the character in no time. All of the character’s actions may then seem gratuitous to the audience, which would be the worst-case scenario for building a good character. If we take Coco’s animation, the first thing the audience learns is that Miguel wants to sing and that he wants to participate in a singing competition.
For those of you who watch more animation movies than I do, if you pay attention, you will quickly understand the target audience of the main characters in all the animations. I am currently reminded of the movie Wall-E. There, a robot finds a tree sapling in a nearly destroyed gray world. Now his goal became to save that sapling. The whole movie is about saving that plant and making the world green again through it. Wall-E was actually saving this beautiful world of ours through plants.
Remembering another movie –Up! Up You must have seen the movie. An elderly couple decided in their youth to make their own house on the side of a mountain. Both were very adventurous. But their wish was not fulfilled due to various obstacles in the world. We see that the couple wants to move their house this time to that particular mountain. We continue to enjoy the movie united with this desire and goal of the elderly couple.
Thus Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar our main character tells us his goal. And we make their goal our goal without batting an eye, laughing at their joy, and crying at their sorrow. Now when we write the story of the animation and create the character, then let’s take care of the goal of our main character. The faster and more clearly we can get that across to readers and viewers, the stronger the characters will be. Another thing to keep in mind when creating character goals is that character goals can change from one event to another. Or many smaller goals can be created within one big goal. For example Coco, we first learn that Miguel wants to sing in a competition. But incidentally, he reaches the land of ghosts. Now going there, his goal is made that he has to return to the human world anyway. Otherwise, he will slowly turn into a ghost. Throughout the movie, Miguel goes through various small goals and finally manages to fulfill his biggest goal – to become a singer.
Must be active
The main character must be active or even hyperactive. If the character has no action then he can’t give rise to events…and why should we like a character who can’t give rise to events? Activity means not only jogging but running. We all remember the adventures of Tom and Jerry. But everyone is not like them anymore. Kung Fu Panda Panda is very lazy, but if you look at it, you can see that the character is very active. He gives birth to one event after another. This one is eating, this one is practicing karate. He’s getting tired, sure, trying to run away from Master Shifu, but never really stopping. ? Surely you remember the movie TurboThat is the story of a snail. If you notice, you will see that even a slow animal like a snail is doing something tremendously in the movie. In fact, if the main character cannot create events and react against the events that occur, then the character is very boring. We don’t say that some movies are boring, the movie is boring!… Now you see, the movie is becoming boring because of the characters. Because they are either unable to produce an event…or are not reacting to events that occur. So while we’re building our animation character, we’ll give him a goal and make him hyper-active so that he’s almost never sitting still. Let him move towards his goal by allowing events to arise.
How to Make an Animation Character? Read to Know.
Not to Lose the Characteristic
A good character will never lose his basic character. We should definitely keep this line in mind when we build characters. Because it sometimes happens that the character that we may have shown doesn’t like apples, is actually eating apples. It must be remembered that a character will never lose its character without reason unless such an event occurs. In real life, a person may do something out of character, but suddenly showing something like that in a movie will raise questions in the mind of the audience and lose faith in the character. We saw Puke in Kung Fu Panda as a foodie and a fun-loving character. Even during a great fight, he quickly picks up some food and eats it. Again, even in the fire, his cuteness is not lost. During character creation, we can write down the characteristics of a character. Some also make character diamonds. In it, six features are written in the six corners of the character’s name. We can create character diamonds for all the characters in our story and keep them to ourselves by writing down their characteristics. If necessary, I can understand what are the main characteristics of my character at a glance. And whether going out of that feature while writing or not.
Underdog
is not only in the game but the word underdog can be found very well in character creation. Most of the memorable characters appear to be underdog characters. I mean, he has been, or is being, abused in various ways. Either he is weak, or he faces such a force that defeat is certain. Underdog characters are always able to create sympathy in people. People can quickly relate to the character, and fall in love with it. But this is the reason why we take the side of the tortoise almost from the beginning of the story of the race between the hare and the tortoise. We know the tortoise can never run with the hare. He does not have that power. But in the laziness of the rabbit and the strong desire to stick to the tortoise, when we see that the tortoise is winning, not the rabbit in the end… then we are thrilled, overwhelmed with joy. We consider the tortoise as our own.
If we sit down to watch a cricket match where Bangladesh is not playing… and if we don’t have a personal favorite team, then in our hearts we support the relatively weaker team. The general position of man is always in favor of the weak. And when that weak character achieves something that was almost impossible for him to do…people remember him for a long time.
We can also keep this common human condition in mind while creating animation characters. The recently finished Coco Miguel is an underdog character becoming a singer is an impossible thing for him. Because every member of the family who is content with shoemaking hates music. When Miguel really becomes a singer in this situation, our hearts dance with Miguel in happiness.
Apart from this some other things we can keep in mind while creating the character. For example, whether the character is elephant-horse-frog-mosquito-fly, the audience will be people. Therefore, through that character, I will express human relationships, human problems, and human desires. If the character has a particular weakness and the audience knows about it, it’s a great advantage to have fun. Let’s say a character has a fear of heights and the audience learns about it early in the movie. It was later revealed that the character had to board a plane at a very difficult moment. Looking forward to seeing what the character does now on the plane. If the character has a weakness, fear, or secret towards a particular subject, it creates a new dimension in his creation.
So, a lot has been said so far. Hearing so much chatter must have caught your head. So how about creating a chattering character? Well…I’m now writing and penning the babbling character. I understand that you did not like the character, you either create a character like you! The character you’ll love…the one who laughs you’ll laugh, the one who cries you’ll cry! Do you have such a character?
