Achievement Goals:

Be able to describe a character’s distinguishing visual traits.

Be able to describe a character’s distinguishing personality traits.
Be able to accurately construct their character from the chosen materials, and be
able to recreate it (in case it gets damaged).

Instructions:
This lesson is about your student building a character they can use for the
animation exercises in upcoming units. If your students have been
experimenting with different materials, this is the time to pick one to go with.

Our goal is to create a character that your student will feel a sense of creative
ownership of, and be excited to continue working with while animating. We
want to make a character that is not only visually identifiable, but has a distinct
personality in the student’s mind.

You can do this one of two ways:

If your student is happy with one of the characters they’ve already made, you can
focus on helping them articulate the character’s personality for this lesson.
You can have your student come up with a new idea for a character and go
through the process of building it as part of the activity this lesson.

Activity:
To help your student imagine their character’s personality have your students fill in
page 1 of this worksheet. You may want to do an example for the class with a
character they already know from a book or movie.
Character Worksheets PDF

Next have your student describe their character visually. If they don’t already have
a character from one of the previous exercises, it might help them to draw their
ideas for the character out as they think how to describe them. You do this on the
second page of the worksheet.

Encourage them to be as vivid and specific as they can when they talk about
how their character looks. For example instead of “He has a big body and little
legs” it would be better to say “He has a big pear-shaped body and thick
stumpy legs”. Or instead of “She has blue hair” it would be better to say “She
has blue-hair in braided pigtails with bangs”. Being specific in how they talk
and think about the character will help them appreciate the uniqueness of their
character.

If you have time, have them think up several characters, and try to make them as
different as possible in both personality and appearance. Pick one to move forward
with for the rest of the course.
If they haven’t already, build the character using whichever material you’ve settled
on.

At the end of this lesson the student should have a character they are are
excited to start animating with.