Our Characters

Character Design Inspiration

 

Our character design style was inspired by the animation, “The nightmare before Christmas” written by Tim Burton. We wanted our characters to have a dark feel but yet a fantasy-like twist like in “The Nightmare before Christmas.” We have used the same tall, lanky design for the characters which helps create this feel. However, the thin delicate design could create problems with movements as the characters have become very fragile. We will have to use tweezers and have patience when animating the characters. Also, we have drawn inspiration from "Harry Potter" for the design of the wind. We have uses styles from the dementors from "Harry Potter" as we wanted to use the theory of Anthropomorphism by giving the wing human like characteristic. The wind is portrayed as a human like figure and we also want to explore the theory of Metamorphosis, allowing the wind to transform and change shape and form. We feel that this style of design is a good presentation of the evil within the wind as it kills Annabel Lee.  

The Nightmare before Christmas

The Nightmare before Christmas

   Harry Potter - The Dementors

 

 

Characters in a Little More Detail

Here we have come up with some more detailed concepts for each of the characters. The characters also have more of their characteristics added to them, such as with the wind. It's more chilling and has sharp edges to represent its evilness and chilling factors. We've come up with several different angles and facial features for Annabel Lee for when she appears within the animation. Also we decided to use silhouettes of doves to represent their love for one and other without revealing the narrators identity

Analysis of Poem and Early Planning of Characters

This is some of the brainstorming we did to come up with the characters and their characteristics. We also started sketching some ideas about how our characters may look

First we pulled apart the poem line by line in order to figure out what will happen in our animation. This will also help in the drawing up of our storyboard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brainstorming of Characters

To begin we chose a poem to base our animation on, the poem Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe is a famous poet and this poem was the last one he wrote before he died. The poem was written in 1849 and is a tragic love story.

The animation will have a narrator that reads the poem as the animation goes along. We are currently hoping to create a cutout animation based on the style of The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) by Yuriy Norshteyn.

From reading the poem we have developed a few characters that are mentioned. The characters we have decided to use that are mentioned in the poem are:

Annabel Lee
Wind
Angels/Demons
Wisemen
Kinsmen
Narrator

 Some character traits we have come up with for each character are:

Annabel Lee
-beautiful
-shy
-passive
-dreamer

Wind
-chilling
-aggressive
-cold
-angry
-evil

Angels/Demon
-dark
-sneaky
-jealous

Wisemen
-old

Kinsmen
-travel in groups
-loyal
-hardworking

Narrator
-impassive
-sad