Principles of Character Animation Unit – The Button Girl Moodboard

Initial Moodboard

This is the “moodboard” that was initially created in the classroom. This emotional board was decided by the team to be made by me, and I also searched for some image materials. After discussion, we hoped to produce an animated film that could be more widely accepted by the public, while incorporating a touch of the strange. So I found some illustrations that we thought were a bit peculiar but not overly violent.

For example, the illustration in the upper left corner – we think that this style, where the characters resemble children’s drawings and the proportions are not realistic and the lines are distorted, is very strange and not bloody at all. At the same time, we believe that the black and white color scheme will also create a certain sense of horror. We would like to apply this drawing method to our works.

The female character in the middle below wearing a white kimono is from the Japanese game “Silent Hill F”. First, there is the design of the female character in a white kimono, which is the monster form of the game’s protagonist. This costume is called “hakama” in Japan and is the clothing worn by Japanese women on their wedding day. In the era set in this game, the Japanese people often believed that after marriage, women had to follow the arrangements of their husband’s family. The face of the protagonist covered by the wedding dress also reflects that the protagonist became a victim of family marriage alliances and gave up on herself. I really like this design that uses unique cultural elements or items combined with the background of the era to imply certain viewpoints. I hope the character designs in our group project can also reasonably add some elements to the characters to complete the shaping of the characters.

The illustration on the right side of the character design for “Silent Hill F” is by the Japanese artist Testsuya Ishida. He combined people and objects in an absurd way to satirize various phenomena in society. For example, he combined people with the escalator, ensuring that the intervals between each person were the same. The movements of those lying on the escalator were identical, and the movements of those standing on both sides of the escalator were also the same, creating a strange sense of order. This reflects the phenomenon of Japan’s highly industrialized and institutionalized society. I think it’s interesting to express repressed emotions through the mechanical feeling presented by combining objects with people. I believe the character design of our project can also adopt this method.

Final Moodboard

This is the final version of the Moodboard created by Wendy. She extracted some of the elements mentioned in the initial version of the moodboard and summarized them.
This is the storyboard we made after determining the setting of the village where the main characters of our group project are located and the general direction of the story. So Wendy searched for some image materials based on these settings. For instance, the picture in the upper right corner represents the “black sheep effect” – in a group, members tend to reject those individuals whose behaviors or traits deviate from the group’s norms. I thought it would be a good idea to design a clear common feature for all the characters. Wendy believes that we can make all the characters have button-like faces to show that they belong to the same group.