Character Design For Production

An 8-week course diving into the tasks involved with character design in a production pipeline

OVERVIEW

VIDEO

INSTRUCTORS

COURSE OVERVIEW

Designing Characters for Production

This class will focus on taking your character designs through a production pipeline and learning to make your designs functional for animation. In this course, you will be acting as a professional Character Designer. We will cover both common and important types of assignments that will be expected of you as a working professional. You will walk out of this class with not only the experience of a real professional setting, but also with professional work that you will be proud to showcase in your portfolio.

Course Format:

Standard

Duration:

8 weeks

Materials:

Photoshop (or equivalent), Wacom tablet (or equivalent)

Lecture Type:

Pre-recorded

Assignment:

Due each week. Expect to spend 8-10 hrs/wk viewing lectures, q&a, and time on assignments.

Skills Level:

Intermediate

Feedback:

Individual recordings

Q&A:

Once a week

Prerequisites:

Character Design for Animation

Course Format:

Standard

Duration:

8 weeks

Materials:

Photoshop (or equivalent), Wacom tablet (or equivalent)

Lecture Type:

Pre-recorded

Assignment:

Due each week. Expect to spend 8-10 hrs/wk viewing lectures, q&a, and time on assignments.

Skills Level:

Intermediate

Feedback:

Individual recordings

Q&A:

Once a week

Prerequisites:

Character Design for Animation

Course Format:

Standard

Duration:

8 weeks

Materials:

Photoshop (or equivalent), Wacom tablet (or equivalent)

Lecture Type:

Pre-recorded

Assignment:

Due each week. Expect to spend 8-10 hrs/wk viewing lectures, q&a, and time on assignments.

Skills Level:

Intermediate

Feedback:

Individual recordings

Q&A:

Once a week

Prerequisites:

Character Design for Animation

COURSE OVERVIEW

Instructor Feedback

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

EXPAND ALL COLLAPSE ALL

The more you know, the better.

Week 1 | Designing a Character with Story

Learn what it takes to develop a story for your character. We will break down the importance of why you should even be creating your character in the first place. Profession can influence your character’s design, as well as their props.

Week 2 | Character Pose Sheets

We will be exploring how to create a character pose sheet. Body language plays a key role when developing a character. Simple posing will make all the difference in persuading your audience that your character is actually alive.

Week 3 | Character Expression Sheets

After posing comes expressions. Once again, personality is what makes a character believable. We will design how our character deals with emotions in these sheets, and use our previous posing as influence for taking our characters further.

Week 4 | Model Packeting our Character Design

This week you will learn how to turn around a character to properly prepare it for modeling or animating. You will learn how to packet your character, along with character expressions and poses, and present them in a clean and professional fashion.

Week 5 | Character Design "Hero Pose"

The pose of all poses: the hero pose. How would you pose your character if you were competing for $1 million? You will learn what it takes to show the ultimate image of your character, and how to completely represent them in one artwork.

Week 6 | The Great Tie-Down!

Cleaning up your poses, expressions, & character turn around in a professional & finished way. Try to think of this assignment as the one you’ve been waiting for all term. We’ve avoided making final choices and cleaning up our designs so we could focus on functionality in our work. Now it’s time to make everything have a nice sense of continuity across all your work from this term so far.

Week 7 | Putting it Together on Screen

We will explore additional characters, that will support the main character we have been focusing on all term. This will help you learn how to design for a whole story, rather than individual characters that are not related. Then we will put them on screen! We will focus on creating a cinematic moment for our characters this week. Story, acting, posing, and even environment will all come into play in this one cinematic shot.

Week 8 | Final Style & Portfolio Assembly

In this week, you will be treated as professionals. You will be handed a professional freelance assignment, along with prepare your work from the previous weeks to look great in a portfolio.

Character Design For Production

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

Instructor

Igniting your imagination

Nate Wragg

/Dreamworks Animation

LECTURES BY Nate Wragg

Nate Wragg was born in Davis, CA in 1983. He took an interest in drawing and painting at an early age. After graduating high school, he studied animation and design at The California Institute of the Arts in Southern California. Since then, Wragg has gone on to work as an illustrator and designer on various projects-including Ratatouille, Toy Story 3 and Puss in Boots. He was one of the primary character designers on the Pixar Feature Toy Story 3. As well as designing characters, Nate was also the Production Designer of Pixar’s short film Your Friend the Rat and has been involved in designing several main title sequences, most notably the animated end titles for Ratatouille. Most recently he was the Production Designer on Captain Underpants.

INSTRUCTOR'S GALLERY:

REQUEST SYLLABUS

STUDENT GALLERY

Character Design For Production

Student Gallery

STUDENT INTERVIEWS

Carolyn, the Flower Shop Owner

Interview with Austin Lee

Carolyn, the Flower Shop Owner

Interview with Austin Lee

Bringing Baba Yaga to Life

Interview with Arthur Lin

Bringing Baba Yaga to Life

Interview with Arthur Lin

Detective Work

Interview with Rune Hansen

Detective Work

Interview with Rune Hansen

Magical Musing of Agnes Toadfoot

Interview with Paul Joseph Nicholson

Magical Musing of Agnes Toadfoot

Interview with Paul Joseph Nicholson

Capturing a Character

Interview with Daria Burkut

Capturing a Character

Interview with Daria Burkut

Quality Over Quantity: Iterating to Find Your Character

Interview with Amber Kenneson

Quality Over Quantity: Iterating to Find Your Character

Interview with Amber Kenneson

Trust the Process and Magic Will Happen

Interview with Alberto Boscolo Gnolo

Trust the Process and Magic Will Happen

Interview with Alberto Boscolo Gnolo

SUMMER TERM REGISTRATION

May 2, 2022 - Jul 18, 2022

ONLY

$699

COURSE BEGINS

July 10th

PRICING SCHEDULE

Even though our courses are the most affordable for the quality of education.

These FINANCE OPTIONS allow you to focus on your goals instead of the barriers that keep you from reaching them.

EMPLOYER
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”

Melis Malatani

Great instructor. Sometimes an online course can be very detached from the real experience of a classroom, however Nate really engaged us as students through his lectures and fast and useful critiques, which made the whole experience more effective and real.

”

Amber K

Nate is one of the best instructors I have ever had—he communicates concepts in a very clear way that is easy to understand and put into practice. His feedback is always very specific and he communicates both what IS working and what is NOT working, and as a result gives students a clear path forward in their work.

”

Kate Dmitrieva

Nate is a great instructor with very professional approach. Many thanks for his thorough feedback and always being there to help.

”

Amber Kenneson

Nate is one of the best instructors I’ve ever had! The way he explains and demonstrates things is so clear—he makes it easy for students to implement what he is teaching into their own work. I know my own work improved by leaps and bounds over the course of just 8 weeks, and I saw improvement in the work of my fellow students as well! Basically, I loved everything about Nate’s course.

”

Alexander Untoria

Allowed me to reevaluate my design process and help me make better final choices when designing a character. Allowed me to focus on shape language and functionality as well as storytelling

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