For my final project I wanted to explore character design and animation in relation to unconscious bias, and the visual language of character design we've been taught to understand by companies like Disney, etc.
I was looking at the way characters are portrayed with visual cues to give away their traits, the theories behind these associations, and ideas around inclusive representation - historically and going forward.
The outcome of this project was a web-based 2D character generator aimed at young or budding character designers or small companies with limited resources, as a jumping-off point for their character design. The user inputs certain personality traits and moods and will be given a corresponding character based on these inputs and the tropes we see in animation - with a custom animation for each outcome. You can see the main project page here.
The characters were created using Photoshop and Illustrator, and animated in After Effects and using the DUIK puppet animation plugin.
