Abigail Koch

Since I can remember, I have always been creating stories in my head to pass the time. As a kid and young adult, my imagination would run wild on paper, my sketchbooks always filled with doodles and characters based on the worlds I had created. This has resulted in my passion for the pre-production stage of animation, specifically in creating the characters and visualizing the story. 

Much of my approach to character design focuses on personality and presentation. I have a love for focusing on gestures and expressions, because so much can be shown of character with just a simple “look” or pose. For my characters in my personal project “Forage”, I had a lot of fun exaggerating traits, such as the mushrooms stubby legs and big cap, and Winnie’s billowy sleeves and rosy cheeks. I also played around with repeating shape patterns and colours to show that their relationship is symbiotic. My work has has an illustrative style, with a sort of “sketchy” look, in that I find my sketches show more personality than fine lining. 

The short film I had the privilege of storyboarding for was “Chaos”. Though I make sure to keep my drawings quick as I work through ideas, I still like to bring the character’s personality to the forefront. The emotions of both main characters are central to the story, and I wanted to make that clear in my boards. “Chaos” also focuses on visual beauty in its storytelling, so I took care to preserve that throughout my storyboarding process as well.