A character is basically a personality's interaction with society, culture, religion and socio economic background. As a designer we had to create new, original characters for a purpose. It can be a character based on a definition from a story or script or even a real person which would be further designed as a character to be used in Feature Films, TV Series, Video Games, Children’s books, Web animation, Comic books, Comic strips, or even Licensing or Toy Design. The character design is the process which comes after the characterisation and consists in defining the character through his/her physical appearance. We needed to consider a character as a little fictional creature, human or not, that aims to please its creator and the public as well.
The character I chose is Gopal who is a 15 year old boy who goes to school, is in the 9th Grade and sells Pani Puri at a roadside stall to make ends meet. He hails from Rajasthan but stays away from home to support his brother in his Pani Puri stall business and also to pursue higher education. A funny, witty, agile, restless, multitasker, quick, efficient salesman who reminds me the characteristics of a monkey otherwise, it was a challenging task to study this character.
ABOUT GOPAL:
He is very fast and very efficient at making and selling Pani Puris.
He loves to interact with people and is very talkative.
He is very friendly which makes people want to talk to him too.
He is a multi tasker and can work swiftly.
He is restless and easily distracted. But also at the same time, he is very agile.
The above sketches were made live while observing him from a distance away from his stall to understand him better as a character study exercise.
After this I started making a lot of iterations, I finally made the model sheet and the expression sheet of my final character.
The next stage was to develop a clay model of the character designed.
