Principles of Character Animation Unit – The Button Girl Critical Appraisal

Our team created a story for the final project that advocates for embracing differences between people. Throughout this project, I gained more insights during the early stages than later on. Our group collaboration involved a well-balanced division of labor: I handled most of the initial work, while Wendy took most of the latter stages.

During the early creative phase of this project, I was responsible for the mindmap, creating the initial moodboard in class to establish our project’s overall tone, artist research and case study, finalizing the beat sheet, texture testing, and scene design. For character creation, Wendy and I collaborated on character concepts, with Wendy handling the final character designs. For the narrative development, after finalizing the theme, each of us created an individual story. We then combined the strengths of these stories to craft a new narrative.

First, I am skilled at storytelling and I gained a more systematic understanding of the essential elements required for the creative process through the Creative Writing course. After we agreed on the strengths to retain from our individual stories, we faced a creative block where we had ideas but couldn’t connect them into a coherent narrative. I suggested I first establish the rules governing the story’s setting and the foundational characteristics of its inhabitants. We could then collectively discuss and develop the story from there. This approach allowed us to first envision how the story world’s environment would influence the main character, drive their actions, and explore conflicts arising from character relationships.

I envisioned the village as a place where villagers became overly obsessed with equality and consistency. They suppressed their emotions, forcing their behavior to mirror everyone else’s. Because they stifled their feelings, their hearts filled with negative emotions that had no outlet. Consequently, the dolls representing their inner selves became distorted and ugly.

With this foundation, we merged the core elements from our respective stories: the main characters was ostracized because of her unique behavior, and there was also a distinctive toy monster. This formed our new narrative—a tale where the protagonist, having dressed their doll differently, is accused by the twisted villagers, attacked by their dolls, and ultimately forced to submit, burying their emotions even deeper.

Secondly, as the setting of the story world is refined, the character’s actions became more plausible. Having lived in a repressive environment since childhood within this twisted village, she came to believe the villagers were normal and herself the anomaly. Therefore, she could only express her inner thoughts and preferences in her own room. This made me realize that in the process of telling a story, every element is interrelated. Often when I’m creating stories, when I notice that the behaviors of the characters I’ve created seem illogical, I just focus solely on perfecting their character designs, but neglect the construction of the world view. This experience made me realize the severity of this issue. From now on, I will pay more attention to these details.

Then, through feedback received during tutorials and presentations, we realized our initial story lacked sufficient plausibility in the character conflict aspect. The villagers’ actions didn’t feel compelling enough to make the protagonist submit to them. This led me to recall that certain aspects of our doll monster’s design remained unused in the plot. I remember we once gave this doll monster a kind of ability similar to shadows, enabling it to change its size at will. I proposed that this doll should slip through the crack of the door and attack the protagonist inside the house. This way, it would make it more reasonable for the protagonist to surrender in such a dangerous situation. This idea received approval from both the instructor and classmates. Through this process, I realized that when crafting a story, one can fully leverage character designs to enrich the narrative.

Finally, in terms of scene design, I made a mistake. Before the story was finalized, I prematurely cleaned up the draft of the scene and added too many details, which wasted a lot of time because later I had to modify the design according to the changes in the story. I will remember this mistake and avoid doing excessive detailed work before the story is determined in future projects. Instead, I will focus more on optimization and the improvement of the design.

During the later stages of this project, I was responsible for background design and coloring, as well as the coloring of the entire animation.

First, I believe I’ve made significant progress in teamwork compared to my freshman year. Previously, when designing backgrounds, I often neglected communication with my teammates, resulting in numerous revisions needed. In this project, however, I frequently sought feedback from my teammates during the background design phase to confirm their opinions and identify areas requiring adjustments. Only after thorough discussion and refinement did I proceed with detailed background sketching and coloring. This approach substantially increased my efficiency in background design and saved considerable time that would otherwise be spent on revisions.

During the process of background design, I made a mistake. When drawing the background, I overlooked the direct positional relationship between the characters and the background objects. This resulted in my making a mistake when drawing the top-down perspective view of the interior of the house, where I mislabeled the size and position of the table. I will pay more attention to this point in future projects.

Secondly, during the coloring stage, I combined Toomboom with other software. Previously, I often used only one software for coloring and animation production. I found that the effects of brushes in different software also had their own unique characteristics, and by combining these distinctive brushes, it was very helpful for the coloring work of this project. Since this project adopted a black and white color scheme, we discussed how to enrich the picture and enhance the texture by adding strokes and shadow lines to achieve the effect of a pencil drawing. During the exploration of this new software and its brushes, I tried various combinations of brushes and finally obtained what I considered to be a very effective result. And through the feedback received from the last presentation, in the part where Botton Girl crushed the button fragments, Botton Girl and the fragments could not be distinguished. So I added pencil-like texture lines for Botton Girl and her doll to darken them, so that they could be separated from the white button fragments. And in the final part where Botton Girl walked into the group, I increased the size of the buttons, so that the part where the buttons fell and were hidden became more obvious.

Overall, first in the storytelling aspect of this project, after effectively applying what I learned from the Creative Writing course, I realized the gaps in my previous creative work and how to enrich the plot through character development. Second, during scene design, I learned that before finalizing a project’s narrative, it’s more productive to spend time exploring design optimization options rather than getting bogged down in excessive refinement. Furthermore, I performed well in background design and coloring for this project. First, through frequent communication with team members, I created background designs that satisfied everyone. Second, by learning and utilizing new software, I achieved satisfying coloring results.