One of my favorite aspects of the creation process is to create characters. For me I use them to drive my story. For me characters come first. Usually I’ll scribble up some character and then it inspires me to think about that characters life.
Below are some of the characters I have created over the years.
One key for me when creating a character is to keep them simple. For example the guy below. Not much to him but a humanoid snail. But for me I think he is awesome. When I see him I start thinking about what he is like, where is he from, what kind of life he would lead, etc.
Personally I like characters out of the norm. I get tired of the good looking guy or girl being the main hero ALL the time. I always wanted the monsters to be the good guys. I wanted the little side kick like character to be the main hero and so for me I’ve always designed characters that were a little off and I would give them a weakness of sorts. That weakness would be part of their character.
Another thing I think about when I’m creating a character is to give him a goofy name that just fits. Here are a list of some of my characters names.
Kalimar, Sasquatch named Joe, Snailo (pictured above), Flog, Alienboy (Raimi is his real name) Low-Key, Spoon, Taco, Soft, Poke, etc.
While some are stupid they are recognizable and say something about the character.
For example SOFT. Pictured below. Soft’s father gave her up when she was only around 2 years old. She was bought by a robot from a planet similar to Cybertron. Basically it is a planet that was taken over by robots. Being advance technologically they joined the Galactic Federation as any other alien race would. This robot is a criminal and has brought Soft to his home planet as a show piece and to have fun torturing her. She endures being frozen and released for over 100 years. However being the daughter of her powerful father she escapes the clutches of her robotic owner, she wreaks havoc on the planet and ends up taking over the robot planet all on her own. Her name is Soft because she is a soft thing in a hard world. This is really where her story begins. She learns her father has taken over several planets over the years and has put her younger siblings in charge of these planets. Her goal is to undermine her siblings to make her way to her father and prove she was the daughter that should never have been thrown away.
All that just to tell you why her name is SOFT.
SOFT is actually a part of my Bigfoot Vs Nerd Universe. I’m thinking big. LOL. Make sure when creating characters that you also copywrite them.
That is just a side note.
Now if you can tell I’m about to start creating my own anime and show you step by step how to do it. Step 1 is creating great characters. Some folks go story first but I go character and let it organically go from there.