Report: Researching Character Design Techniques Used In 'Up'

Introduction

In this report I will be looking into some of the character design processes carried out during the production of Disney-Pixar's 'Up' (2009). I have chosen to research the development of this film in part due to the similar themes of house-based-adventure in this film and in my animated piece for this module. My research has primarily been informed by 'The Art of Up' (Tim Hauser 2009) and special features from the DVD of 'Up'.

The concept of ‘Up’ began with a simple sketch featuring an early incarnation of Carl (the films protagonist), described by director Bob Peterson as 'a cranky old man selling the happiest balloons you'd ever seen'. Despite this image having been produced long before any production had begun on the film, the juxtaposition of happiness and crankiness within the image already serves to encapsulate the basic essence of Carl; ostensibly callous and angry, yet warm and eccentric on the inside.

The initial sketch which led to the creation of Carl

When I began looking into character development for the film 'Up', one of the first things to strike my attention was the powerful simplicity of much of the artwork. Many of the images produced early on in the film's production consist simply of basic lines and blocked out shapes, yet still manage to exude a powerful sense emotion and personality.

Very early concept art conveying the general character of Carl

Although these images were produced at a very early point in development, they still offer a concise and detailed insight as to the character of the films protagonist, Carl.

'Simplexity'

The term 'simplexity' was coined during the production of 'Up' to describe the way in which its characters were designed. Production designer Ricky Nierva defines simplexity as: 'the art of simplifying an image down to its essence. But the complexity that you layer on top of it - in texture, design, or detail - is masked by how simple the form is'. Director Pete Docter states that the production team wanted 'to caricature and heighten the sense of shape' in their character designs through the technique of 'abstraction'. Comic artist Scott McCloud describes this process as 'stripping down an image to its essential "meaning"' in order to 'amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't'. This technique can be observed even in early developmental artwork for the film:

An illustrative sketch by Ricky Nierva portraying the use of shape in the character designs for 'Up'

This sketch by Ricky Nierva demonstrates the basic shapes that were used as a basis for some of the main characters in 'Up'. An astounding amount of information and character is conveyed through this image: we see Carl represented as a square - whose sharp corners and harsh edges convey a harsh, grumpy character, while conversely, Ellie is represented as a circle - the opposite of a square; no harsh edges or sharp corners, just a soft round shape representative of a friendly and warm personality. Already we can begin to draw connections between these characters and deduce what kind of relationship they might have as a couple. Bob Peterson adds that most characters are round, rolling and moving forward; with the exception of Carl, who - being a square - needs the other characters to push him forwards. 

Moving into later stages of the development, and towards more technically detailed concept art, the emotive charm of the images only continues to expand; while maintaining the 'simplexity' described above:

Fig. 1: A piece of concept art produced by Daniel López Muñoz depicting the Character of Carl

Fig. 2: A piece of concept art produced by Lou Romano depicting the Character of Carl

These are some of my favourite pieces of concept art from the film, primarily due to their beautiful simplicity. While the images merely consist of a man sat at a table or on the edge of a bed, they remain powerfully expressive. The characterisation contributed by the designers' use of basic shapes in the character of Carl is aided and embellished by the environment around him. The framing of the 'shots' is also beautifully thought out, conveying Carl's state of mind. For example, the way in which Fig. 1 shows the door frame literally boxing him in, and the way in which the lighting leaves Carl in the shadows.

'Chunkification'

As the character designs became more and more developed in 2D, the production team began seeking ways of translating their design ideas to 3D. This introduced new challenges in terms of maintaining a traditional, minimalistic aesthetic; character supervisor Thomas Jordan cites the work of Rankin/Bass as a major influence in this area.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (Rankin/Bass 1964)

Jordan explains that the team were keen to achieve the same 'cosy, small, contained feel that stop-motion gives you' in the visuals for 'Up', in particular to convey this atmosphere within Carl's house. Ricky Nierva uses the term 'chunkification' to describe the 'charming, toylike quality' created through the emulation of a traditional stop-motion style. Characters were modelled as though they had been created by human hands, as opposed to having been modelled digitally. Nierva details the key characteristics used in 'Up' to mimic the stop-motion style as larger, thicker features such as strands of hair, eyelids, feathers and fingernails. Once again, the team were striving for simplicity in the basic form of their characters, as opposed to exploiting the potential 3D allows to include almost limitless detail in an image.

Sculptures depicting the character of Carl during different stages of his life

Above are sculptures of the final character designs created as a reference for the 3D modellers. Sculptures are often used during the development of a digitally animated 3D feature as part of the general character design process, however given that 'Up' was intended to look as though it could have been produced as a stop-motion piece, these sculptures were vital to ensure that the 3D character models used in the film could in fact exist as real-life miniatures. Once 3D models had been produced to the specifications of these sculptures, the character design process was complete.

Life on the Edge: Finished Animated Clip

My animated clip is finally complete! and here it is:

The animation of this clip was fairly straight-forward as my animatic was quite highly detailed - much of the remaining work simply involved redrawing the moving elements and adding colour and inbetweens to frames from my animatic.

I used Adobe Flash to draw and animate this piece, and Adobe After Effects for compositing and bringing all the elements of the animation together - a particularly useful tool in this piece of software being the motion blur tool, which can be seen in action at 0:05 and 0:15 of my animation. I feel that motion blur really helps to convey a feeling of momentum; in real life some of these actions - such as the planks flying off the bottom of the hut and the hut flying off the cliff - would happen so fast you almost wouldn't even see them... making it tricky to animate such a motion convincingly, yet with motion blur this type of motion is very straightforward to achieve.

To conclude, I'm really satisfied with this piece of work and I will hopefully return to complete the animation at a later date.

Some Finishing Touches To My Designs

As I approach the production of my finished animation I decided to put some finishing touches to some of my designs to make sure they look as polished as possible in this piece. below are some model sheets depicting how the 'characters' of the hut and the bird look from different angles. This would allow any turns in the characters to be animated consistently if the animation were to come into production. I also find model sheets a great way of getting to know your characters better, it really helps to flesh out the images a bit and bring them into the real world; as opposed to having them exist just from one angle.

A model sheet depicting the 'character' of the hut from all angles

A model sheet for the bird in my animation, who I have chosen to name 'Klaus'

This piece illustrates where Klaus's features all lie in relation to each other, as well as demonstrating the way that his form is based upon a circle

In addition to fleshing out some of my character designs, I decided it would be interesting to look into more developed concept art for my environmental designs too:

Above is a fairly detailed sketch showing the first scene of my animation; while this piece of concept art is definitely too complicated and contrasting to my character designs for it to be used in my actual animated piece, I still feel that the process of producing it has given me a greater understanding of the world in which my animation takes place. Below, however, I have taken a much simpler approach; simply colouring the black and white images which I designed earlier for my animatic:

Coloured background for scene 1

Coloured background for the first antarctic scene

I really like the simplicity of these images and feel they match the style of my character designs nicely enough to potentially be used as the backgrounds in my final animation. The only concern I have regarding these images is that the antarctic background features no outlines and therefore clashes slightly with the background to scene one, which features thick, chunky outlines for the most part. I will most likely only need one background for the animation I produce for this module, however if I ever choose to develop this animation further outside of university, this is an element of the design that I will have to reconsider.

My Final Animatic With Sound

I have now recorded all the sound effects for my finished animatic/animation! here is the result:

I'm really pleased with how most of the sound effects came out - the only one I'm slightly unsure about is the sound made as the hut crashes into the sea. As this sound effect was recorded in a bathroom, the tiled walls resulted in a lot of reverberation that I struggled to get rid of completely through noise reduction and EQ without making the audio sound too washed out. This may be worth revisiting if I get time - If it was rerecorded in an environment with normal walls I'm confident that it would sound fine.

I also mentioned in a previous post that once I had completed the sound for my animatic, I would be able to make a more informed decision as to which segment to animate. Now that the sound is done, I feel that the most dynamic section to animate would be the scene in which the bird lands on top of the hut. I was very happy with the way the sounds contributed to the visuals here, particularly the way the hut owner's footsteps cause the hut to creak as he leaves; this shows the age and weathered nature of the hut effectively and concisely. I all I just feel that this segment is the most rich in terms of both audio and visuals, therefore this section will best showcase the overall feel of the animation in the short amount of time given.

Looking Into Sound For My Animatic

Recently we have been learning about the process of producing foley for animation. Foley is the term for sound effects which are added after a piece has been filmed... so in the case of animation, just sound effects in general. Having learned a bit more about the process of capturing and editing sound for animation - for example, the difference between particular microphones and how to use software such as Adobe Audition to EQ sounds and add effects such as noise removal and reverb - I began to draw up a list of the sounds that my animatic will require:

A basic break down of the different sounds required for my animatic

And here are my thoughts as to how I will go about producing some of the more obscure sound effects I need:

• Wind: a) blowing and/or whistling into a microphone with reverb added in editing
• Wood creaking: record a creaky door/door handle and change recording pitch or speed as necessary
• Bird wings flapping: put an umbrella up and down
• Whale blow hole: record a tap for the sound of water being sprayed out of blow hole, with a pop sound effect added to the end for when the hut emerges
• Hut crashing back down: record a kick drum, slow down and add a lot of reverb

I will record these sound effects over the next few days and add them to my animatic; once this is done, I will be ready to begin work on my fully animated piece!

My Final Animatic

This is the final production animatic for my animation. As you can see, I have made use of the background art I posted some time ago on this blog; I feel this worked really well in terms of conveying exactly the type of atmosphere I wanted in each scene, as opposed to focusing more on the foreground, as animatics often do. I discussed why it would be beneficial to apply a greater focus than usual on the backgrounds for my animation in my blog post about environment design.

I'm really pleased with the way this animatic turned out. As I mentioned when I posted my initial animatic, timing was something I put a lot of concentration into for this piece, as my initial animatic had a somewhat rushed feel to it as a result of many shots not being on screen for long enough. With my final animatic, however, I feel the timing is spot on. 

The next step now is to look into producing some sound-effects for the animatic, before going on to fully animate a ten-to-twenty second segment of my piece. I am currently torn between two segments I want to animate: I will either animate the scene in which the bird lands on the hut, causing it to fall off the cliff; or I will animate the scene where the hut is swallowed by the whale and is blasted back to where it was. I will make a final decision on this once I have completed my sound effect work for the piece.

The Hut: Fleshing Out My Design

Earlier on in my blog I made a post explaining the various choices I had been contemplating with regard to the design of my hut. One of the key design choices I faced was whether or not to make the hut's features resemble human features, and whether or not I would animate these features if I chose to go through with this idea, or if they would remain static.

Below are my fleshed-out designs for the hut as it will appear in my animation...more or less. While these images show the hut with a relatively high level of detail, I imagine the design used in my finished animation will be simpler in terms of texture and line style, simply to make it easier and faster to draw, thus making the animation process smoother and making the 2D drawn animation technique more technically viable.

I have simply included the image on the left for the purpose of showing how the hut looks on its own, without any of the signs to embellish it; in this image it is easier to read the 'face' of the hut, with the windows representing eyes, and the wooden beam below the windows representing a mouth. In my previous post about the design of the hut, I discussed subtlety. With this design I feel I have stuck a good balance between personality and subtlety; the face isn't distracting or perhaps even overtly noticeable, yet it still portrays a characteristic absence of mind and the hut's disinterest in the world around it. As such, when the signs are added, a juxtaposition occurs between the owner's extreme desire for his adventure holidays to be as exciting and awesome-sounding as possible, and the dreary, desolate atmosphere surrounding his hut.

Experimenting With Hut Designs

Today I have been experimenting with potential designs for the hut in my animation. Given that the hut essentially plays the role of the main character in my animation, it is imperative that the design is as appealing to as broad a demographic as possible and conveys the personality and mood necessary to tell my story in an entertaining and engaging way.

In earlier posts, I had a basic look into the general form the hut might take. This was primarily inspired by imagery gathered through my early mood-boards:

Left: An image from one of my initial mood-boards
Right: A sketch I produced showing my interpretation of the hut as it could look in an animation

Over the past few days I have been considering how I could take this idea forward towards a design that could actually be used in my animation. Here are some developmental pieces I produced in order to test various ideas and concepts I had regarding the potential design:

An early piece of development art for the hut

The above design is the first piece in which I experimented with using elements of the hut's design to express emotions and give the building a slightly more human appearance, helping the audience to connect on an emotional level with the hut as a character.

I then decided to take this idea forward with a more in-depth look into how it could work. Above you can see how I developed the idea of using circular windows as eyes to convey the hut's reaction to its surroundings. I think this idea works very well, is as much as it does lend a subtle human feel to the hut,  however having the expressions change during the animation may be somewhat too abstract and cartoony for the kind of animation I want to produce, which will hopefully be a fairly traditional piece of digital 2D animation. In the illustrative piece above, it can also be noted that from the front, I have subtly attempted to give the hut a similar form to the human face, this will hopefully add to the effect I am trying to achieve.

The idea of having they facial expressions change during the animation strikes me as something that would be more suited to a 3D animation style, where the principles of squash and stretch can be more easily exploited in non-human elements. An example of this is the film 'Monster House', a film which was screened recently as part of the Research and Development for Animation module.

The technique works fantastically in this film, however I would argue that the key reason for this is that Monster House is a horror film and the concept of an inanimate object coming to life can very easily go wrong (or in this case, right) and look very creepy, perhaps due to the uncanny valley effect.

To conclude, I feel the use of human attributes in my design for the hut is a good idea, however I also feel that the more subtly this can be achieved, the better. It is most likely I will simply give the hut a fixed facial expression to convey the general mood of the piece.

Environment Design

Today I spent some time looking into the backgrounds that would be required for my animation. Due to my story's lack of traditional characters, I feel that my use of environment design and backgrounds will contribute strongly to the narrative, as there will be less emphasis on the foreground and more emphasis on the world as a whole.

First of all; I used my initial storyboard (click here to see the blog post about my initial storyboard) to ascertain what environments will be required for my animatic - which, unlike my animation, will feature all of the backgrounds in the story. These are the backgrounds required:

• A long panning shot of a vast grassy area with mountains on the horizon; this is where the hut is originally placed
• The bottom of the cliff; where the hut falls into the sea
• An Antarctic scene, clear in the middle for the hut to float through yet with a piece of land/ice in the foreground to allow the seal somewhere to sit
• A second Antarctic scene; this is where the cliff will be where the hut is eaten by the whale. This scene features a zoom - as such the background had to be designed quite large with this in mind.

I then set about collecting references images and pieces of inspiration from online - primarily using the website 'Pinterest' as an image source. Here are the key images that inspired my background art:

This image ended up being a particularly notable piece of inspiration,  directly influencing the layout for my panning background for scene 1

While this image was captured from a completely different angle to the way the landscape will be portrayed in my animation, it still caught my attention for the similarity of the environment and the amazing autumnal pallet seen in the trees and foliage; this is a colour scheme I would very much like to implement in my final animation.

I loved this image of the Antarctic. The landscape is baron and empty; which is perfect for what I'm trying to convey, however there is a beautiful depth to the photograph, the combination of thick fog and a distant landscape conveys a fantastic feeling of mystery and potential for adventure.

Here I once again wanted to look into how to draw my cliff faces, in addition to this I also wanted to investigate how water looks when it meets with the bottom of a cliff; with waves crashing and frothing against the rock 

Here I once again wanted to investigate how I could represent antarctic waters, without just drawing a big empty landscape. I love the colour in this image, and the way the sky is so cleanly reflected in the water. Once again, the idea of distant shapes and landscapes is a key feature of this type of environment... 

...and continues to be in this image.

More investigation into how waves meet the bottom of a cliff; here I observed the jagged rocks that reach out of the waves at the bottom of the cliff, which I couldn't see in the previous image...

...However upon further inspection they are a fairly common element in such environments

These are the background images I ended up producing:

Above: Long panning shot of Scene 1 background

Above: Scene 2 background

Above: Scene 3 background

Above: Scene 4 background

I am very pleased with the way these pieces turned out. I had initially only intended to produced some quick illustrative pieces to portray the general feel of the environment, however I am confident that these pieces could be used for my animatic, and - with some enhancements including colour as well as some animation for added embellishment (primarily the movement of water and trees) - perhaps even my finished animation. I aim to experiment with the use of colour in these images at a later date.

Written Treatments For My Animation

Below are the written treatments for my animation concept. The purpose of the short treatment is to convey - in as few words as possible - the general essence of what I aim to get across through my animation, whereas the long treatment serves more as a synopsis to illustrate the narrative of the animation.

Short Treatment:

Desolate. Extraordinary. Oblivious.

Long Treatment:

A precariously placed adventure holiday boutique boasts to 'live life on the edge'. However despite the owner's best efforts to make the holiday-hut look as enticing and exciting as possible, customers still remain elusive. This makes for an ironically unremarkable day to day existence for our business owner. One dreary afternoon, while its owner embarks on a routine outing to gather supplies, the hut breaks free; experiencing an epic adventure all of its own. Upon returning, the owner is completely oblivious to the immense voyage that his shop has just undertaken.

Rough Animatic From My Initial Storyboard

Yesterday I posted the first draft of my storyboard to the blog. Today, I decided to create an animatic from this storyboard in order to see how well the frames work when viewed as a video with the correct timing (or at least as correct as it can be at this stage of development):

I am pleased with this animatic in that I am confident that the images from the storyboard are easy to read, and the general framing and layout of shots work well from a cinematographic perspective. I am however less happy with the timing of the piece as a whole; the entire animatic feels slightly too fast and many shots would benefit from being left to linger briefly before cutting to the next scene/action.

This animatic was simply a quick test to make sure the shots work and that my story makes sense visually, so I don't feel it is necessary to update this piece to be 100% correct. Clearly, however, when I come to make my final animatic for this piece, I must pay more attention to the timing of each shot, and ensure that the piece lasts longer than this animatic.

Rough Storyboard of my Initial Idea

Below is a rough thumbnail storyboard for the animation I intend to make at the end of the module. The piece is based upon the inspiration I gathered while I putting together images for the mood-board I posted earlier on in the blog. While I was searching for images to inspire me, I found I was naturally gravitating towards themes of baron landscapes and isolation; this is reflected quite strongly in my storyboard.

For the story itself, I was really interested in the idea of the unseen journey; the exciting and wild things that happen everyday that we don't even notice. My main character owns a small shop in the middle of nowhere that sells extreme tours, yet ironically nobody ever comes to visit. However as soon as the owner leaves his shop, the building goes on an extreme journey of its own, only to have returned by the time the owner returns. In summary, every day is a journey and every day has the potential to be exciting if you know where to look.

I am yet to decide upon timings for each of the shots in the storyboard, however I aim to produce a quick animatic in order to determine how long each panel should last.

Character and Background Design Session

In this week's session, we experimented with the use of digital collage in order quickly and efficiently generate concept images to a written specification. We began with a description of a character, who to my mind came across as being a callous, elderly man with spider-like proportions:

...and the image below was produced to the specification of a dystopian future in which nature has reclaimed the Earth's landscape:

I really enjoyed this method of producing imagery for an idea; primarily as it requires a fairly minimal understanding of the concept you are trying to develop, thus making it ideal for a fresh project. The use of existing imagery really helps to generate solid imagery, rich in depth and texture, that would be extremely difficult to achieve if one was to try and draw the same idea from scratch on a blank page. I'm sure this technique will be helpful when I come to developing my animation for this module.

Experimenting with Moodboards

Since the last lecture, I have been experimenting with moodboards by using websites such as Pinterest and Getty (As suggested by Emma Landolt during her Skype talk) to collect relevant images which might help inspire an idea for the animated piece that I will be developing for this module. In order to locate images, I  searched for the various synonyms and concepts from the spider diagram which I poster earlier on in this blog. Once I had collected a fairly large number of images, I began to sort them into categories (e.g. 'nature' or 'the middle of nowhere') before using the best images to produce the following moodboards:

This process has helped me to clarify what kind of concepts I am most interested in pursuing in terms of developing my animation. Clearly I am very interested in the idea of wide open isolated spaces with just one or two features appearing in the baron landscape. I was particularly inspired by the small hut with the 'Fishing' sign; I really like the idea of having a tourist attraction in the middle of nowhere.

Above are some quick sketches I made after finding the image of the hut. The way it's so precariously placed on the edge of a cliff brought to mind the idea that the hut itself might fall off and go on a journey of its own - I this idea struck me as quite interesting as I don't think I would have otherwise considered the potential for the 'main character' of my animation to be an inanimate object.

Mood-Boarding Session

In this week's lecture we looked into the use of mood-boards as a way of presenting ideas and gathering inspiration for a project. We began the session with an exercise in quickly producing mood-boards to convey our perceptions of two scenarios - the first was about a news-caster who finishes work, drives home in his sports car and has a candle lit meal with his wife in their fancy house:

The second was about Queen Elizabeth I sentencing a pair of criminals to be beheaded after acts of treason:

Following this exercise we received a talk from a Emma Landolt, a senior creative at Drive Productions. Emma discussed with us the importance of mood-boards and how they can benefit the creative process in ways such as helping you 'get everything out of your head' or to quickly and easily assess what a client likes and what they don't like (this point struck me as being particularly important).

We were told that Emma begins her mood-boards by simply browsing image sharing websites such as Getty or Pinterest, saving relevant images into a series of folders sorted by what the images represent before going into each folder and only keeping the best images until there are just 10 or so images left per mood-board. This selective process helps narrow down what you really want out of your project. The mood-boards I created above were produced using images from
Examples of Emma's mood-boards along with information about last year's R&D talk can be found here.

Below are examples of mood-boards I found online that I find inspiring:

Images flow together really well through use of a limited colour palette. Overlapping images give a close and cozy feel very homely, the colours convey a calm mood which adds to this.

I like the layout here. Again the palette is limited which helps the images connect, yet they all seem more separate as they don't overlap; could be good for themes such as isolation or to imply distance between things; this compliments the imagery used here.

Brainstorming Ideas

Today I spent some time brainstorming around the concept of the word 'journey'; the word which will be the 'genesis point' for the piece I create at the end of this module.

I began my brainstorming by simply trying to sit down and quickly sketch my immediate idea of what 'journey' meant to me:

A quick sketch to get down my immediate thoughts on the word 'journey'

My immediate thought on the word journey was that life in itself is a journey as we develop from one state of life to another, e.g. baby to toddler. I had thought it was a pretty good way of looking at the word 'journey' until I stopped drawing and looked at it; at which point it just looked morbid and cliched. At this point I found myself questioning what a journey really is, so I created a spider-diagram to help further my understanding of the word:

A thought cloud based around the word 'Journey'

I began by looking up the dictionary definition of 'journey': 'an act of travelling from one place to another'. I then looked at how the meaning of the word could be expanded upon by looking up some synonyms. Many of the synonyms were just different ways of travelling such as 'cruise' or 'fly', however some words really caught my interest as I might not otherwise have come up with them; such as 'pilgrimage' or 'safari' - less vanilla words that spur the imagination help bring strong imagery to mind.

After I had gained a better idea of what the word journey means and looked into words associated with it, I had a look at some news headlines to see if any stories could be described as a journey in some way. I was surprised to find that almost all the headlines I saw could have been described as a journey in some way (come to think about it, aren't all stories we tell about a character's journey?). One headline featured 'surfing dogs' - this one really stuck me, as in just two words there's a method of travel - the literal part of the journey - as well as a statement that immediately makes you think about the back story and the journey that must have happened in order for the dogs to end up surfing; whether this is a literal or metaphorical.

I've definitely improved my understanding of the word 'journey' through these exercises and the spider diagram should come in very handy when I come to the next stage of development: producing mood-boards.