An animated character might appear in thousands of frames, drawn or posed by several different people, and the audience must believe it is the same creature every time. That consistency does not happen by talent alone. It comes from a deliberate design, reference sheets that pin down every proportion, a rig that makes posing fast and repeatable, and a methodical way of matching mouth shapes to sound. This lesson follows a character from first sketch to its first spoken line.
Designing a character that can be animated
Good animated characters are built on shape language: rounded shapes read as friendly and soft, squares and rectangles as solid and dependable, and sharp triangles as dynamic or threatening. A strong design also passes the silhouette test: filled in solid black, the character should still be recognisable and its pose readable. Simplicity matters for practical reasons too. Every stripe, button and strand of hair has to be redrawn or rigged in every frame, so animation designs keep detail where it carries personality and drop it everywhere else.
Model sheets and turnarounds
- Turnaround: the character drawn from the front, three-quarter, side, three-quarter back and back, lined up on horizontal guides so the eyes, shoulders and feet sit at the same heights in every view.
- Construction and proportions: the simple shapes the character is built from and its height measured in heads (for example, three heads tall for a cartoon child).
- Expression sheet: the face in a range of emotions, showing how the brows, eyes and mouth change.
- Pose sheet: typical attitudes and gestures that show how the character moves and stands.
- Colour model: the exact colours for each part, with hex or swatch values.
- Size line-up: the character beside the rest of the cast, so relative heights stay consistent.
Rigging: puppet pins and bones
A rig is the control system that lets an animator pose a character instead of redrawing it. The simplest is a set of puppet pins (the Puppet tool in After Effects is an example): the software covers the artwork with a mesh, and dragging a pin bends the mesh around it like rubber. More capable rigs use bones: a skeleton of joints arranged in a hierarchy, where each child bone follows its parent. Rotate the upper arm and the forearm and hand go with it. The joints must sit exactly where the character would bend, at the shoulder, elbow and wrist, or the artwork will fold in the wrong place.
- Rotate each bone in turn, from the parent down: shoulder, then elbow, then wrist
- Natural for swinging, free motion such as a wave or a walk's arm swing
- Each joint keeps exactly the angle you give it
- Move the end of the chain (the hand or foot) and the software works out the joint angles
- Natural when a hand or foot must stay planted: pushing on a table, feet on the floor
- Needs a pole or bend direction so knees and elbows bend the right way
Lip sync and the mouth chart
| Mouth shape | Sounds | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Closed | M, B, P | Lips pressed together. Never skip it, or the word looks wrong |
| Open | A, I (as in 'father', 'bike') | Jaw dropped, mouth wide open |
| Wide | E (as in 'see') | Corners pulled back, teeth showing |
| Round | O | Lips forming an open circle |
| Small round | U, W, OO | Lips pushed forward into a small pucker |
| Teeth on lip | F, V | Upper teeth resting on the lower lip |
| Tongue up | L, TH | Tongue visible behind or between the teeth |
| Consonant / rest | C, D, G, K, N, R, S, T and others | Teeth nearly together, mouth slightly open |
A chart like this, popularised by animator Preston Blair, reduces speech to about eight to ten shapes. Three rules make lip sync convincing. Animate the sounds, not the spelling: 'phone' is F, O, N. Do not hit every sound: fast speech has more sounds than frames, so hold the vowels and the closed M, B and P, and let small consonants pass. Lead the sound slightly: the mouth shape should appear a frame or two before the sound is heard, because viewers perceive a mouth that changes late as out of sync. Programs such as Adobe Character Animator and Toon Boom Harmony can suggest mouth shapes automatically from the audio, but animators still adjust them by hand.
Exposure sheets
An exposure sheet (x-sheet, or dope sheet) is the plan for a scene, laid out with one row per frame. Columns hold the dialogue broken down into sounds at the frame where each is heard, the action notes, the drawing or pose number for each layer, and camera instructions. To fill it in, the animator scrubs the audio and finds the frame where each sound begins: at 24 fps, a sound starting 2.5 seconds in falls at frame . Digital 'dope sheets' in animation software do the same job as a grid of keyframes against time.