The Importance of Appealing Design

I was watching 'Delgo' today and when the disc hung on me 30 minutes into the film, I quit watching it. To be fair, the environment was actually done pretty well, although the story was predictable and the animation was lacking the acting ingredient that makes an animation good. But the biggest issue was the unappealing character design that made me cringe whenever the characters appear on screen, especially the main characters. Mark Kennedy's blog page, 'Temple of the Seven Golden Camels', brought up the topic on appealing versus unappealing design. The following is taken from part of his blog:

"But here's why it is important: unappealing drawings can kill an otherwise good idea. I have seen this over and over: a really good idea gets storyboarded with unappealing drawings and the idea just dies. People can't put their finger on why it doesn't work but they know it's not quite clicking, and it's only because the drawings are not very appealing. And so a new idea is brainstormed, and it gets rewritten and reboarded all over again, when the old idea was good, it just didn't get presented right. Everyone responds to good design and appeal on a deep level and they aren't always able to articulate the fact that they're being turned off by unappealing drawing and it's affecting the way they react to the ideas. But it definitely happens.

Ideas can be unappealing or appealing as well. As you storyboard and make choices about how to present the characters and situations, you should always strive to find the charm and entertainment in every idea in the most appealing way."

Mark also talked about the simple things that people forget once they leave school. If you are interested to improve your animation, be sure to check them out.

'Part 1: Silhouette'
'Part 2: Appeal'
'Part 3: Draw clear, not clean'
'Part 4: Three dimension drawing'
'Part 5: Making poses more expressive'