At present, China’s film animation industry market continues to expand, and there are a number of strong animation production companies in the industry, such as Ray Media, Aofei Entertainment, Huaqiangfangte and so on. These companies have obvious advantages in terms of capital, technology and talents, and are able to launch high-quality animation film works.
In the animation industry, the preliminary work of film and television animation is the foundation and key stage of the whole animation production process, involving many aspects such as project planning, conception, creative development, and character and scene design. The work at this stage lays a solid foundation for the later stages of animation production (e.g. modeling, animation production, effects, dubbing, etc.).
This includes character design for animation. Character design is a crucial part of animation production, which involves creativity, emotional expression, characterization and other aspects. The basic responsibility of a character design designer is to create and design the images of the characters that appear in the animation, which may be protagonists, villains, supporting characters or background characters. The designer needs to create characters with personalities that are highly compatible with the story content through styling, costumes, movements and expressions.
The specifics of the job usually include the design of the character’s appearance designers need to create a unique look for each character according to the requirements of the script or the director. This includes not only details such as the character’s body proportions, facial expressions, hairstyles and clothing, but also the cr scheme and visual style. The look and feel will be designed to fit the character’s personality and function, as well as adapt to the overall style of the animation. Firstly the character designer has to have a full understanding of the character’s function and story needs. The designer needs to create a general image of the character based on the script creation director’s interpretation and the overall style of the animation.
As an animation character designer, the work not only includes the creation of the character’s appearance and modeling, but also ensures the character’s functionality and animation effects, such as the complexity of the costume design to present a quality 3D effect, because most of animation industry in China currently uses 3D animation, rather than 2D. However, in the pre-production stage of the work, there are still a lot of 2D designers who need to carry out the design of the scenes and characters. However, in the preliminary work, many 2D designers are still needed to design the scenes and characters.
