Characters in animated stories 

This lesson is about how the characters are the engine of the story, how the story surrounds them, drives them and in this way acquires narrative validity. We will also discuss character combinations in animation, how they complement each other, and how they move to animate them.

Objectives:

1. Understand how the characters are the engine of the story and how they are essential to tell it.
2. Understand and identify the types of characters, how to create them and how to make them complement each other.
3. Create a character in dimensionality and in graphic terms for animation.
4. Be able to adapt to other created universes in terms of personality and design.

Through the knowledge we have acquired:

Why are the characters the engine of the story?

A character must be indispensable, whether the story carries it or it is the one who carries the story, it will always be the engine. If the character is not, the story is being told poorly, so we must focus on the story and the character to understand how they complement each other and how the creation of the same is affected by its context.

What types of characters are there? How do they mix properly?

Depending on the theory there are different types of characters, but for that matter we will focus on main characters, secondary characters and spectators. The main ones are those who make the story move, those who have some interest or a greater force makes them make decisions that modify the story and the narrative.

The secondary ones are those that accompany this main character, like helpers or funny characters that are all the time next to our main character.

The spectators are the characters who do not modify the story but are there.

The mixture of characters is built through their personalities and interests, if we want to create a story correctly we must mix opposing characters or who have opposite interests so that the story develops, here the analysis of the experiential and audiovisual referents is very important, to understand how different characters and with different personality conditions can create funny stories.

What are the dimensions of a character?

The dimensions of a character are:

Physical: what they look like and how they are affected

Psychological: Their mind and how they are affected

Sociological: Their physical environment and their thoughts in a specific place that creates different behaviors.

What is important for the correct animation of a character's movements?

Understand that its dimensions make our character move in a different and complex way, its social position, its physique, its age and the referents that we have are important to create the movement.

In this way, asking ourselves how does it move? It is the right question to consider.

Conclusions

The characters are the engine of the story, they must be well-designed, located in a good story so that they work correctly, their dimensionality must be taken into account to create their animated movements.

Here you have the contents of the lesson in PDF: