My name's Robert Ryan Cory and I'm a character designer. >> I noticed with your drawing tools you've got some stuff that looks like pretty specific art tools, and some stuff you look have, this Crayola markers [INAUDIBLE]. >> [LAUGH] Yeah. >> I know a lot of artists, when they're thinking of doing character design they wanna get super fancy tools so could you talk a bit about why you've got some Crayola stuff mixed in there with the fancy stuff? >> Yeah, actually I guess it's kind of, I developed a lot of stuff from a guy named Ed Benedict, who's a character designer. He designed the Flintstones and Yogi Bear. I studied under him when I was very young, and he kinda organized all his stuff like this too. The Crayola stuff, I don't know, it's like $3 for a pack of 50. And they're better than any Tombows, or any of the art supplies that you get at a art store, where they sell them for free. And they're kinda fun when you're done with them. I just chuck them across the room. Like there's something there's a bit of relief in that. And then specifics about just this pencil is actually from 1923 or something. It's one of my favorite pencils. It's called the Eagle Diagraph and it has like a little bit of a perforated age or something down here. And basically the lead on it is incredible. And of course I have black wings and charcoals and brawls and stuff and some of these are Mitsubishi in Japan actually makes pencils. Some of these are really cool and then I have the dumb Crayola stuff and they just, I don't know they work really well for what I'd like to do. Especially I brought the Crayolas out because I knew I was gonna do some drawing and sometimes doing really fast drawings, the Crayolas they just glide really fast and then you can go over on with a black pen and kinda get stuff done really fast. But yeah, Ed Benedict kind of always keep it sharpened and specifically, and I've tried attempting that. But this is just the one I travel, I've been actually taking this back and forth to Disney which is where I'm working at right now. So it makes it easy and so I have all my special pencils that I like to usually use and then I don't have to have two different sets that can just bring with me. So that's kind of why it's set up that way. Just my thought process if you I'll kind of talk it about while I'm sort of kind of putting stuff down. Automatically I go, okay, well what's the thing that communicates kind of someone who holier-than-thou, but completely wrong, and that's the pig. In his own crap. >> I found a good pig with a fucked up face. >> [LAUGH] >> If you want to use that for some. >> Wow. Yeah. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, I might lay down some. >> So, usually, when I kinda start doing this stuff, I start blocking stuff off pretty quickly and it's almost kind of like how. And fighters a lot of the time too, they end up using like, there's a hit box around everything and so everything has to be within precision. It's almost in and outs and that works well with animation and it's also almost how you have to block things off for mass structure. Cuz if something's hanging too much out of a hit box you don't want to be huge target. You wanna have advantages and stuff and you wanted it to make sense and communicate certain ideas and stuff. So right away you just kinda start blocking off mass. It's almost like abstract a little bit when you do this kind of stuff. Where you just sort of like, okay, well this is kind of you have this where do lines come in as. This is the nose, this is the eyes I'm just kinda figuring out the mass part of it. And then I'll be thinking kind of the character part of it which is, okay, well you're talking about a million dollar man and kind of like I'm trying to envision that kind of big but pompous and stuff. So it's, I keep thinking, okay, well I want obviously his bigness to read the most and so his body mass would be the most important shape and everything around that will kind of be muted. You want the character to read and the shape part of this. So I'll start kind of like blocking in where did I want the, how much mass distribution one way. I kind of be thinking about. I also need it to move and be functional so it's how much of it. And I'll be doing a lot of little doodling right now that will look like garbage. [LAUGH] So just figuring out how much of the shape, cuz I want it to be a brawler but I also want it to be. It's communicating a lot of different things and so specific can be great because if you have a vision right away for stuff then you can zero in on it probably faster. But if there's a lot of areas you can go into you kind of go well, I have this issue I need to confront, but I'll also have this issue I need to resolve. And, so, for me, character is the most important. I wanna make sure that that gets communicated, more than the design, almost. I'm willing to throw out most designer principles in order to make sure it communicates with an audience, like something very specific. A lot of stuff I end up doing for my jobs ends up being humorous, even the video game stuff I worked on. I worked on a Konami skating video game that's Funko and it was a humorous one. And so almost everybody sees me. And humorous. But, I actually played a lot of fighting games, and one of my favorite designers is a guy named CRM, let me make sure I get it right. Because, he goes by aliases. His name's Bengus. Sometimes he gets called CRMK, and that's the guy who designed all of Capcom's fighting games in Japan, and he's very great. He's actually influenced by another artist who does JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Keepa, I think is his name. And he also is an awesome influence by an American comic book artist named Jim Lee who now runs DC. He did all the Marvel versus Capcom artwork based on Jim Leaves rendition but he kind of found the bridge between those two designs. I think a lot of designers end up, the ones who end up becoming really good, kind of do that they find the idea of marrying things that people maybe didn't think about really well. They look and go, oh, this kinda connects here. Where it came from for me is I was looking at this guy, or I was listening to a band called Deerhoof. And they were talking about deconstruction. And I didn't know deconstruction existed in art, at that point. I was, oh, this sounds amazing. I started thinking, well how would you do that in art? How would you do it in cartooning specifically? And so they were saying, in their version of deconstruction, what they were doing is they were making jingles, something that would just play on a commercial, and then they were deconstructing it and adding noise to it, and seeing how far they could remove it from the jingle, without ruining its underlying appeal, like that jingle has. So I was like, what's the most appealing thing in the world, and I thought Sanrio. And then I ended up kind of doing shell like drawings where I would do a Sanrio shell and then I would draw something disturbing inside and see how like distorted. So a lot of those things that that movement of art is coming out right now is basically the beginnings of distorting Japanese cute shells and that's kind of where that full art style comes from. So it's like a marriage of those ideas. One other things, when I start feeling design, I start making the expressions to of the characters. And, when I'm really happy with a design, I start making noises. I find myself making airplane noises, and stuff. Depending on what I'm drawing, I actually have music setup for different types of inspiration to. I have music that set up when I decide to draw a lot of monsters so, for people. So a lot of the music that I listen to is sometimes just really scary electronic music or symphonies and stuff. And then I'll listen to certain musicians, I will just get lots of visions. I get these kind of visions where I'll listen to a song and I'll get a specific idea and every time I listen to that song I will see that vision. And so I'll just have to draw it, it just has to come like out of me when I listen to the song. And then, kind of when they draw it, it's hard to enjoy that song again, cuz it's like oh, I've already figured it out, this part of it out. Students see, especially with video games, so much of characters in a t-pose, but I've noticed that, when designing almost no designers work in sort of a strict what I mean? Like that T-pose. They're all working in sort of a pose that gives a little more personality to a character. >> I think you have to do that. It's like one, I've worked in T-pose stuff for CD stuff, especially Penguins of Madagascar and stuff and it's discouraging, to say the least. You don't feel anything. I tend to think of character right away in 3/4s. 3/4 communicates what you need it to. You end up getting a lot of just the personality and stuff, and you can always base everything out of the three quarters so there's not any real tricks. You can't hide behind something, a front, or something else can hide. You can render something and then have to problem solve it later. And that's not good, you don't want to get into problem solving when you've fallen in love with the design and a specific view because then when you do that you just end up getting very sad all the time, because you realize you gonna have to change so much of stuff. And the functionality is the most important thing in all design. If it doesn't function, it's an illustration at that point. And so you kinda do have to make sure. It would be cool in some ways to be sitting down with someone who would be modelling this and kinda going back and forth with them too because even though I will attempt to make sure that I don't add anything in here that can't be figured out in animation, you can always see stuff in animation and just be like oh shoot. That's not gonna work out for this kinda stuff, especially in a video game, in a fighter, like I said, the boxed stuff, you kinda have to go, oh, is this gonna be a grappler? Is this gonna be they call them shojins. Or I can't remember all those stupid names for them all I know is how they play and that's is this a person that pushes the other player across the screen or is it someone that needs to come in close? And that kind of determines the animation movement and stuff if someone needs to coming close, then obviously they don't need to grab someone as much. They grab people, but they don't have to have extended long limbs. Someone who pushes people back a little bit is more defensive player. That's the kind of player that you're gonna have to extend out the limb. So this guy can get a little bit more blocky, is what I'm saying. Cuz I'm seeing him as a kind of a grappler cuz of his mass. >> When you're brushing out a design do you usually start with ink and not pencil? >> Yeah, I mean. I'm also doing it probably cuz it's a little bit easier for you guys to see it [LAUGH] that way. But no I do. If you I can pull a couple of sketchbooks out in the other room and I draw straight ahead in ink lots of times. There's a lot of stuff in design where I'll be going back and forth. I do multiple passes and that's the thing I'm more worry about communicating to an audience, especially [LAUGH] in a kinda film like this, or study thing. I love talking about design. The first thing you'll realize when you get a job, to all the students listening to this, is you'll be so thankful. You'll be like wow, I can't believe this. And you get your paycheck and you'll just be like I never thought this would happen. And by then all of a sudden you'll be like I'm giving my entire life to doing 60 hours or 70 hours and then you kind of go back and forth between you will end up having moments where you're just like giving it all to your job and then you have moments when you're like, I have nothing more to give. And I think that's just a natural process because being an artist doesn't turn off. Especially being a designer, you end up, once you start getting into the tunnel vision of seeing the world in this thing, it never really goes away. And you have to learn, I've just been learning last few years it's like actually sit down and make sure I get time do other things. To reading, to taking vacations, to doing things that I care about cuz I used to only give it to art. And I used to think, well if I'm not doing it in art, then I'm letting people down. Or I'm not good enough to continue having my job. But I think you just end up, at a certain point you just get more confident as you do it. But you also realize you spend more time out of commission after being burnt out than if you just did like that, what's the word I'm looking for, renewable energy. [LAUGH] This is the same as the environment. There's a point in your life where you're planting seeds. And then your harvesting crops but the part of farming the people forget all the time is actually resting the soil. All of design is design. And we were talking a little bit about the soft which is just like. It's all the same principals, it's brevity of communication. And there certain principles I will talk about a little bit while I'm doing this. So certain principles that you can have write away is head's tall on every character. The less head's tall things line up to be equal the more interesting the design is. Cuz it's a contrast thing but the more equal it is the more appealing it is. And that's just the balance of design. Design itself is a balance of mass. So because he's a pig, I kind of want this mass to be the biggest. I can take this mass right here and I can draw it separately. And I can take all the arms and legs and I can put that mass together. The greater the difference, the more high contrast, and actually will even look more sinister. But it'll also just be very high contrasted and really design-looking. And then the more equal it is, the more appealing it will be. So, design is just the balance of those two things, of working back and forth between those principles. How much do I need to make this appealing? And, how much of this do I need to make interesting, just for the design's sake? And, design, in general, for CGI the, wishing they would go back and manipulate things, because they're getting better at rendering, and allowing for more, detail on things, and so then they think oh I'm gonna hide this thing like this, guy's gonna have this battle scar and it's gonna communicate he was in a war. And they get so in their head about the design and, it's like, you're not going to communicate that by having this little, tiny scar that you only see when you come in at a certain angle. If you really wanna someone to look war-torn, you can do it in a big, general way, and then never again, and not do it in a million tiny little ways. So, that's the kind of way I try to think of it is, what's the quickest way to do it? And in a big way, so there's no questioning like okay, what is he trying to say here?
