While writing, reading or listening to a story, it’s characters that comprise the essence. In other words we relate th those characters, they have to ability to build a story or to completely knock it down. If done well, characters can be really inspiring and build a strong connection with your target audience in character animation videos.
In this article, we present to you an exclusive sneak peek on how characters are created. Enjoy it!
Customized characters work best
Before you start sketching characters for an animated explainer video it’s best to craft custom characters aimed to your specific target audience. By this what we mean is, characters are customized keeping in mind how potential customers look at them and behave. Characters generate emotions and a strong connection from your target audience.
But characters cannot be created overnight out of thin air. It’s not as simple as it may seem, creating and animating takes a lot of hard work. Developing that special connection within the audience is really important and for the human element required in the animated explainer video, unique characters do the job perfectly.
Let us now take a detailed walk through the process behind the design of each character. Let’s begin by breaking the entire process into 5 simple steps:
Careful study of the creative brief
The first step consists of careful study of the creative brief by the designer which is sent by the client. That’s how he gets a full understanding of the message that needs to delivered to the target audience. You have to know well your target audience and not to forget the key benefits of the products and services.
The brand research
This step follows step #1. The creative team at the video production company digs deeper into research to gather more information about the brand, its core values, its benefits, etc. By the end of this step one has gathered complete feel of the brand, its ability to visually communicate and its co-relation with the brand’s visual rules.
The visualizer comes in
The collected detailing is forwarded by the team to the head visualizer. He then conceptualizes for the character: the style, look, feel, aesthetics, demographics, nationality, brand identity, references etc. At this stage, he is all set to work on the first draft of the animated explainer video creation.
Begin sketching
It is the job of the visualizer to hand over his sketches to the art director who makes any necessary tweaks.They sit and work hand in hand and a series of back and forth sessions happen between the two until they finalize ideal model for each character.
Finally animation doles out
The final version of the character design is sent to the guys sitting behind the animation chairs to be rendered and ready to put in action. The completion this step brings us to part where the characters are animated in the video.
And hence we come to the end of character creation but before leaving you we’d like to put in our final thoughts on it.
Make sure the characters are in 100% alignment with your brand personality, culture and target audience before making them the face of an animated explainer video.
