Unit04_ Character Designs

I should make the character designs including their personality, environment like the first unit, so, I needed to make the details of not only their appearance but also their various face expressions and clothes.

References for Character's Body

After the discussion with others in my team, we decided the style of character and their background as "Cartoon Style". And I selected some reference images of character's body seems like simple and unique.

There are only two characters, Min and Brian, in the storyline and I made some details of them such as age, and appearance during I was editing the scripts.

Min ( Female / 19 ) _ Protagonist

Initial Settings of Min

This was an initial settings of Min about her personality that could influence to the storyboard or environments around her. To be honest, when I was drafting the characters, I didn’t really plan on giving them names. However, as I revised and developed the script, I gradually became more attached to the two characters, so I ended up giving them names. I was going to name the main girl ‘Minji’, which is the most common female name in Korea, and ‘Min-ah’ or ‘Min-ha’, but I thought that a name that is easy for non-Koreans to pronounce and remember would leave a better impression on the viewer, so I decided on ‘Min’. Although the alphabet is different, I think the name will be more memorable because it is quite similar to ‘Mean’ in pronunciation.

For easy works of modeling and rigging, I should make their bodies as simple shape like these images. After drawing its simple body shape, I drew the clothe on it.

Various Face Expressions

In terms of the story flow, Min longs for communication with others even though he has to stay indoors for a long time due to the cold of the Ice Age and communication is difficult due to the decline of technology. Then, when Brian, a friend he was lucky enough to contact through Discord, was cut off during a huge blizzard, he mustered up the courage to go outside. He went from a small and relatively warm indoor space to a large and cold outdoor space. Min is quite well-planned and has good execution skills, as he rides a scooter to the town where Brian lives and searches for his house using only an analog map, not online.

In Min’s case, I designed the character’s actions and personality based on the assumption that “what if I lived during the Ice Age?” While researching the effects of the Ice Age on the Earth and humans living as part of nature, the decline of communication technology and the increased reliance on online resources due to restrictions on going out greatly helped in establishing the relationship between Min and Brian, their surroundings, and Min’s actions in that situation. Since humans are social animals who desire interaction and relationships with others, I thought that they would feel a considerable sense of isolation and loneliness in the situation mentioned above.

Brian ( Male / 22 )

Brian is the important character for this story as he had been the movement of Min for going outside against blizzard as well as her only friend in modern society face to ice age. He also feels alone because he was cut off from communication with others and had to rely on technology that was gradually deteriorating. So, he also was happy to begin conversation with Min eventually.

Various Face Expressions

Although his appearance was brief and finally Min didn't meet Brian, I hope his existence would be illustrated a good friend to takes her from the warm but small indoor space to the bitterly cold but wide outdoors after a long time. When I first started writing this story, I already had the ending in mind and wrote the script, and I took into account Brian's presence as this motivation for Min.

As he was appeared with his guitar, he enjoys playing a guitar and listening to the music and he wears a glasses because he also likes playing games with his computer. In this point, he has many common grounds with Min according to her initial setting and personality. So, they might become more familiar to each other as soon as they began communicating in online.

The origin of this boy's name is quite simple compared to Min's. It is taken from the name of 'Brian Cho', who created the song 'Antifreeze', which is the same title as the animation title 'Antifreeze' and is the biggest inspiration.

A photo I took myself at his London gig

To explain about Brian Cho, the vocalist and lyricist of the Korean indie band The Black Skirt. He was born in 1982 in South Korea. And he immigrated to the U.S. with his family shortly after graduating from elementary school in 1995, and is currently a Korean-American. He attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, but dropped out because he couldn't focus on his studies and was only focused on making music with his friends. In 2008, he released an album called '201' in Korea, which became a huge hit in the Korean indie music scene.