Thesis: Inspiration Images

One of the largest inspiration on the design of my characters come from the most recent animated short from Pixar, "La Luna" (Shown at the top and bottom of the post). In the short, a small boy sets out on a job with his father and grandfather. Through the short, the boy gains confidence and obtains a new level of individuality and personal understanding. The young boys wide set eyes, soft lighting, and variety of facial expression create a cute, relate-able, underdog of character that the audience feels for. This is the overall feeling I hope to create with my own.


Although I intend to use a similarly proportioned character, the "La Luna" characters use modeled hair rather than hair physics. Even though its far more difficult and may take me some time to get right, I plan on creating more realistically rendered hair. The image on the left comes from Deamworks full length feature, "How to Train Your Dragon." The movie was stylized, but had very high quality rendered hair. It also doesn't the main character of move, Hiccup, has a hair style similar to the one I imagine for my protagonist.


The hair style of my character is more important than just the appearance of the character. By having the hair in front of his face, he can hide his gaze from others. This is a tactic used to display the insecurities of a character. It is used to display his low self esteem and self questioning. This is the root of the of the characters inability to be creative. The image on the right is from the video game Final Fantasy XIII and is another example of high quality rendered hair.


In terms of skin, my characters will have softly lit skin using subsurface scattering. This style of skin has been used since the first toy story. It gives a softness to the character and to the animation that I want my film to have. The Disney film Tangled, shown left, also displays the type of softness of hair and skin I hope to obtain. The movie is more stylized to the tone of a traditional hand drawn animation given the company's history. This created a clean, soft, bright tone with expressive characters. Tangled, being a movie entirely centered around a girl with long hair, is another great example of rendered hair.