Character Creation Process
On his personal website, Murray describes his character creation process as "sometimes like playing Frankenstein."
- He starts with the personality. He shapes the conditions that make the character "tick," the character's imperfections, and the appeal. He asks himself, "Why would I want to tell stories about them?"
- If he is working with an anthropomorphic series or book with varying animals, he chooses an animal that, in his eyes, match the created personality. According to Murray, this resulted in a social caricature in Rocko's Modern Life.
- If he is working with an anthropomorphic series or book using one animal, he alters the specific character design to match the personality.
- Murray likes to vary eyeballs by size and color. He also varies nostrils. Murray believes that inconsistencies "make it more interesting"
- Murray then selects colors that, in his view, "feels right." He believes that yellow and bright colors "match a mood." If a character is "negative," he will pick a color that, in his opinion, matches the character.
- If he has to teach a crew of artists how to draw the character, he creates a model sheet for the character.
Murray says that one of the interesting aspects of character creation is the evolution of the personalities over time. In a one-time movie, the characters will have a static personality, but for a television series, the characters will change from season to season, developing new relationships, and even changing from mere background characters into a main character.
Read more about this topic: Joe Murray (animator)
Famous quotes containing the words character, creation and/or process:
“But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough
And pressed at midnighht in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’m not suggesting that all men are beautiful, vulnerable boys, but we all started out that way. What happened to us? How did we become monsters of feminist nightmares? The answer, of course, is that we underwent a careful and deliberate process of gender training, sometimes brutal, always dehumanizing, cutting away large chunks of ourselves. Little girls went through something similarly crippling. If the gender training was successful, we each ended up being half a person.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)