Full Character

Here's a portrait of my main character, my protagonist.
Right now, his name is Farmer Shell.

The main issue behind finalizing his design was that every time I drew him, he looked different.
A line would be different here and there and would stand out enough to make him look like a completely different character each time - but eventually I got a hang of it.

By the looks of my animatic (time-based comic version of a film) right now, this film is going to turn out being nearly 8 minutes long.
24 frames per second, 480 seconds, 11,520 drawings.
If this is my main character he'll be in a good chunk of that 11,000.
For the purpose of animation it's a demand that I be able to draw him several times over and have him look exactly the same each time.


Now lets go into the analysis of this as a character.
When it comes to breaking down a character in Ruben's class, it's qualities and number of dimensions (1 dimensional, 2 dimensional) are determined by the traits you can find in it and can be summarized at a term per trait.  Each trait for a character has to be diametrically opposed from each other.

The two terms/traits that my character had in my class critique were:
Hopeless Farmer.

Farmer came from
the overalls,
plaid,
his male features,
age,
and a few other traits.

Farmer means
male,
steady,
worker,
crop,
and other similar qualities.

Hopeless came from

observing the emotional qualities he exudes,

and responding emphatically to those emotions.

'thats the goal of a good character... is to make your audience feel'

[Here's Ruben explaining how he articulated this trait - how you have to tap in to your thinking:

'When I see this farmer and I think of all the conditions of what a farmer has to be and has to become and all the struggles they have to face, you know essentially I can feel all the emotions coming from farmer... but there's something conflicting with this farmer that does not make sense to a farmer that is a struggle for a farmer to feel, because now I'm feeling it.  And it does not make sense that a farmer should feel this and that is the feature.  That is the feature that is in conflict with the farmer that is producing the character.]

[someone in class suggests the term 'hopeless']

[Hopeless, beautiful.  Farmers cannot be hopeless because that would be against every farming intuition.  They always have to have hope.  That is part of the condition of being a farmer.]