Freedom & Liberty: Character Design and Development

                 

  

Character design

Authors own

I feel that the most successful part of my character design is its detachment of gender and race, as humans comprehend it. I kept everything simple, which works well in portraying a lack of identity. The process of designing the facial features of the character was interesting, as I had to consider avoiding any racial stereotypes, so I tried to keep the features simplistic, choosing to give the character brown eyes as brown eyes can be found within most races. I chose orange as the skin tone as it further detaches human ideas of an existing race. Initially I was going to give my character hair, but it quickly became apparent that different styles/textures of hair were developing an identity for the character, no matter how androgynous the styles were. Therefore, I decided to stick with the one curled hair atop the characters head. I tried to design an outfit that was in keeping with the idea of non-gender, non-race, non-ideanty. I found the red jumper and genes to work best as both men and women these garments and they are quite simplistic designs, saying very little about the personal taste of the character. 

Storyboard Idea: No Face

This story flows from bottom to top.

1) No Face is living in the black obis of the ocean, but decides to venture out onto land to share his poetry. 2) No Face meets a man on the beach who tells him how good his poems are and that he could sell them for him. 3) The man on the beach takes credit for the poems and ends up rich from No Face's work. 4) No Face goes back to the sea and calls upon a siren to help him get his rightfully earned money. 5) One day, the thieving man is relaxing on the beach with all his money and the siren approaches him. Whilst he is entranced by her presence, No Face steals the money from right underneath him. 6) No Face goes to the big city with all his money and becomes a successful poet.

The like the issues tackled here. The fact that No Face hasn't a face, therefore he expresses himself through right. He also has no access to much of an audience so he goes of in search for one. He encounters the greed of the word above and calls onto his family to help achieve his goals. It's definitely an uplifting story. One that is basically a comment on how a talent has found it's voice and identity in a harsh world. However, I don't feel that the struggle No Face encountered brought enough tension and anticipation to the story.