Meet the Puppet Masters - Carlos Grangel

They gave him an actual horse whilst designing for this movie, like damn.

   Carlos Grangel is a Spanish-born illustrator and character designer for animated films who has worked on some of the most famous titles in modern cinema, including 2D classics such as We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993), The Prince of Egypt (1998), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) to 3D and stop-motion works like Shark Tale (2004), Madagascar (2005), Corpse Bride (2005) and Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012). It is during Meet the Puppet Masters during 7th November event that I had the opportunity to have a closer look into his beginnings as a comic book artist to the amazing character designer that he has become today.

   To make that big leap from drawing for a German comic series (Which was still pretty successful) to designing characters for some of today's most famous animated films, Carlos needed to be versatile when it came to his art style to survive in the business. During his free time, Carlos would study animation on his own, to better improve his skills as a character designer (Having joked that the studio would have fired him had they actually seen any of his exercises). Turnarounds for characters had especially taken awhile to perfect, but they would prove to be one of the most important aspects for character design later on.

   To differentiate their art style from Disney, Dreamworks needed to push the shapes of their characters and in a way, make them more 'graphic' (Meaning much more exaggerated and cartoony, so keep your mind out of the gutter boi). Aside from turnarounds, silhouettes of the character also helped visualise each of their outline and personality. As character designers, the more references drawn by them, the easier it would make work for the animators (So try to get as many angles, expressions and poses done of a character when designing them before they are sent off to get animated... AKA, the concept bible).

   When working on The Prince of Egypt, it had taken 2 months for the character designers to finalise Moses' design. For such a film (And Road to El Dorado), it was of course beneficial to do some proper researching for more historical accuracy and genuine-ness-ness. Character lines ups helped in making sure that the art style would remain constant for all the characters (That's most definitely an issue many of us tend to face).

Carlos Grangel's character designs on cereal boxes,
consider it his signature or trademark if you will~

   Unlike past titles, Corpse Bride would be the first (Perhaps?) film where he would work from beginning to end. They needed Carlos' skills in bringing Tim Burton's sketches (As nice as they were in their scribbly goodness) to life, giving them a more solid and definite shape so that puppets could actually be made of them. He would also later on see how the characters would turn out when the model makers commenced their part of the job, and was in a way a supervisor of sorts in making sure that all the characters would turn out right.

   Carlos does not necessarily work on sequels, seeing as character designers aren't normally needed as the designs of the characters are already established. An interesting statement seeing as sequels tend to vary so much in quality. And while How to Train Your Dragon 2 definitely had a lot of heart and soul put into it, I did feel that one of the film's glaring issues was the fact that there wasn't a constant style used for all the dragon designs, making them all too different from one another. But going back to that statement, sequels tend to bring up new characters (Lame or not, it doesn't matter), character designers are surely still needed, especially those that had worked on the first title... or is this a Jim Carrey thing?

   So to end off this post, important things to consider if you want to become a character designer: Turnarounds, Silhouettes, Reference, Concept Bibles... PUSH IT.