Principles of Character Animation Unit -The Button Girl Mindmap

In class, our group selected the keyword “target audience” from the document. We plan to target our audience at teenagers because all the members of our group have just reached adulthood recently, and we still have vivid memories of the troubles we faced during our teenage years.

These problems that trouble us are almost common to every teenager. We believe that starting from these issues can help teenagers empathize more.

Through discussion, we found that during our teenage years, we all experienced troubles in interpersonal relationships. For instance, I once felt excluded because I didn’t share common topics or interests with my classmates. I was very distressed about this.

During the teenage years, people tend to be more sensitive to the gaze of others. Being different from others or overly conforming to others can have certain negative impacts on them. We hope that through our works, we can encourage teenagers not to reject differences.

After researching, I found that according to the personality mask theory in Jungian psychology, people often have a role they adopt in public to adapt to society, which is called a “persona”. At the same time, people tend to constantly suppress their negative emotions, which is also known as the “shadow”. This was very much in line with the behavior I exhibited during my teenage years when I was facing the predicament of being excluded. I constantly suppressed my inner desires and thoughts in order to conform to others, but this only made me more miserable.

I believe these phenomena can be incorporated into our work, so I included them in the mind map. I drew a mask beside the “Persona” section in the mind map, and for the “public impression” section, I sketched simple drawings of different identities. I am thinking about how to summarize and present in our group’s character design the images of these people that are shown to the public, as well as the behaviors of attaching labels to themselves.

In the “Shadow” section, I wondered if it would be possible to express these repressed negative emotions through some concrete methods. Perhaps the characters in the work would secretly inflict violence on some people to vent their anger and thereby experience the pleasure of control and power, leading them down the path of evil.
In the “Gaze” section of the mind map, our group thought about whether we could incorporate some surveillance-like elements into our work to represent the act of gazing. For example, surveillance, eyes, mobile phone photography.