Character Design
As our story has only one character, the decision of how she looks was very important. It was a collective decision to not assign gender to our character, therefore, we referred to our our character as ´her´or ´she´. The design had to represent a neutral character, which roughly led us to her proportions.
The material was also a really important factor in terms of the design and construction. Keeping in mind that our character is made out of threads and the story is about threads, we adapted her look to the characteristics of this material: tall and thin. The arms and legs being long was important, to give her a outstanding and elegant appearance. Respecting the animation of the interaction between her and the strings we decided to give her as realistic hands as possible.
Designing the face was the most complex part.
We wanted a simple yet expressive face.
We asked ourselves if the eyes should be realistic or not and if we would have “replacement” or “moveable” eyes. The first sketches were life like, but became simpler during the process.
As our story doesn’t have dialogues we asked ourselves if we needed a mouth at all. As a mouth helps a lot in accomplishing facial expressions, we planned to have one initially. But over time we realized that, although a lot more challenging, it would be interesting to show her expressions and feelings through the eyes and the body language.
In any case, we were well aware of the fact that the details of the design would change during the process of construction, especially because of the possibilities and limitations of the materials, therefore we were open to new ideas.
