From the course: 21 Foundations of Animation

What is appeal?

From the course: 21 Foundations of Animation

Start my 1-month free trial

What is appeal?

- [Instructor] Appeal is the X factor, it's the magic ingredient that your work, well, it has it or it doesn't have it. A lot of work can be very technically qualified, it can do all the right things but still not be appealing so I hope these images are appealing but sometimes you do everything right and you look at the drawing and it's just boring, it's not appealing. So let's work through some examples of appeal and you'll see what I mean. So this is one of the most infamous forgeries in the history of art. It's a fake Vermeer by van Meegeren, I hope I got the name right. It's obvious now when you look at them with the gap of time, the works are technically very talented, a lot of skill went into these but they're dead. There really is nothing in these, they're just lifeless. Realism and technical expertise are not everything. Sometimes they're just technical expertise for themselves. So appeal obviously is something we see a lot in animals. This is one of my cats, a very mischievous character and you can see the spark of life in his eyes and that's the kind of thing that we're trying catch with our drawings and here's another example of a lovely dog I photographed very recently and you don't even see the eyes here and look at this guy, I mean, people were stopping on the street to hug him, so appeal is something that you have to watch out for. Here is my favorite teddy bear which was given to me by my grandmother before she died. I was just a baby. So for me, this is obviously very appealing. He's like a Frankenteddy at this point. Almost everybody has something like this stuffed away in the attic, the plush toy that they would never bear to part with. And again, look at how simple the eyes are. They're just little black dots, so this is the kind of thing that this magical quality that we're trying to capture in our work. Another example of one of my cats and I just snapped this accidental photograph. When I saw it, I thought this is hysterical. You can see in those little tiny points of eyes you can see a brain working. This is the real craft or the art rather of animation is try to put the illusion of a soul inside our drawings, so when we try to do drawings, we're using these often very technical systems of construction, trying to capture these principles and if you do them right, you can get some really nice results. So you don't have to draw in this style but this is the style that I work in and this is the style that I'll be teaching you throughout the rest of the course. This is a drawing that I did for my drawing course which is in the library. Something that would not look amiss if it was drawn in the 1960 or 1970s, for example. So appeal doesn't just mean cute either it can also be charisma, it can be charm, it can be a villain and think of any Disney movie you like, there's always the villain or villainess and they are always a schema and we always want to see them because they're fun to watch. And again, this also applies to any character you want to design, whether it's an alien, a blob creature, Frankenstein robot, it's a universal principle. So I'll just end with this very quick little thumbnail sketch I drew to cheer up a friend. It's very simple, very flat, it's not at all in the Disney style and if anything has more appeal. So sometimes it's easier to get appeal if you're working in a strong basic graphical medium and it's not even necessarily something that has to do with seeing the eyes either and sometimes we can capture this magical quality from a different point of this in this little napkin sketch that I did. You can't even see the cat's eyes but we get the sense again there's a brain inside there, there's a soul. So that's appeal, let's move on.

Contents