It's Not a Bad Story, You're Just Not Emo Enough!

I've recently been playing through Final Fantasy VIII, which I thoroughly enjoyed when I was in high school. Now...not so much.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it's a long, long story, but for the purpose of this post, I'll just say that it's about angsty teens dealing with seemingly giant problems. My point is that back when I was 18, the game had a lot more pull for me. This has a lot to do with the fact that I myself was an angsty teen at the time.

This is about the general concept of target audiences. A target audience is any demographic that a form of entertainment is designed to appeal to. At first, one might think that an artist should try to make their work appeal to everyone, or at least as many people as possible. But this is impossible. I don't care how great your story is, but a 3 year old boy, a middle-aged housewife, a tween girl, and me, a twenty-something guy, cannot be interested in the same material. Peoples' brains are just too different.

But once those differences are distinguished, people become so similar within their sub-categories that it's downright creepy. Guys between the ages of 18-35 will watch anything with cleavage, explosions, and/or stupid humor. Tween girls will latch onto metro-style boy toys that can dance. Toddlers won't watch something unless it is simplified down to its most basic form, and appeals to their incredibly basic understanding of color, number, shape, morality, etc. The list goes on, and most entertainment companies have the human race figured out on a psychological and sociological level. Even if you think you have different tastes than these general categories, you simply fall into a sub-category with many other people. All humans seek entertainment, and that is something that somebody can make a profit off of.

How, then, can an artist use this to their advantage? First, the artist must ask themselves 'what is my target audience?' Probably the easiest one to aim at is the one you yourself fall into. If you like it, odds are, people similar to you will like it. But you have to determine what it is about your work that people would like. Look at other stories that have the same audience: what are their focuses? What do they downplay, or completely skip on? Different audiences have different attention spans: how do you need to adjust your work to compensate for this? If you're aiming at a target audience that you are not really a part of, that's fine, but do your homework. At the risk of betraying my own demographic, I have to admit that I really don't like zombie movies. But if I was commissioned to make a zombie comic, book, or film, my first step would be to find out which zombie movies/comics/books are the favorites and get a hold of those ASAP.

I'm almost done with Final Fantasy VIII. I can see some qualities in the story that still appeal to me, but I've outgrown it. But that's okay, because the world is never in short supply of angsty teens...no matter how much I may wish it.

Space Travel Before It Was Cool

Some of my favorite science-fiction stories are about space travel. Now, there are obviously a lot of stories that fit into that sub-category, but my favorite ones are about space travel before mankind could actually do it. Think about it: now that humans actually can live and work in space, or on the moon, how might that have influenced the fiction writers and illustrators of today, as opposed to before the concept really began to take form in the 1960s?

Science-fiction movies and TV shows of the time before the NASA program had a much more simplified concept of space suits, rocket ships, aliens, and technology. Novels and comic books showed space travelers as pretty basic explorers, wearing jumpsuits with domes attached to the head and a small breathing apparatus. Planets very distant from a sun would simply be cold, as opposed to housing liquid methane, and planets close to the sun might be kind of hot, rather than instantly-boil-your-face-off hot.

I've always viewed these kinds of stories as a bit more 'pure' in their imagination. Though the NASA program--and others like it--have become a spring-board for a great number of fantastic ideas, science fiction stories preceding space travel had a tendency to focus more on the 'fiction' as opposed to the 'science.' A lot of this quality has been lost because audiences today simply can't stretch their disbelief as much as they used to: for many decades, space suits must be depicted as bulky, multi-layered, vacuum sealed costumes, in order to keep out the harmful environments that all people know exist in space.

In this sketch, I tried to imagine a space suit of someone walking around on Saturn's moon Titan--a moon extremely distant from the sun. One of my goals was to imagine the suit as if it would have been imagined in the 1950s. The man is wearing a flight suit, with a few attachments for the airless, freezing, icy environment.

Silhouettes: Part 2, You will Know Us by our Shadows

This second aspect of the silhouette is in regards to character design. If I did my job correctly, you should instantly recognize these three people. The reason that you can is because there are characteristics about their structure and design that separate them from practically all other people you've ever seen. When I put it like that, it sounds impressive, right?

A character should be designed with this issue in mind. Overall shape and silhouette are important for the characters body, but it's doubly important for their head. This is because when the camera pulls in closely to the character (like when they are talking or expressing) they still remain instantly recognizable on some level--at the very least, distinguishable from the other characters. Thus, hairstyles and head gear become great assets to an artist.

But if the characters aren't going to be completely shadowed 100% of the time, why is this important? Excellent question, I'm glad you asked. Like I said earlier in this blog, the mind recognizes people by abstraction and generalization. What if the entire Looney Tunes cast was all rabbits? Do you think Bugs would stand out as much as he does from the rest of the cast? (remember, there are always exceptions to 'rules' in art: in the cartoon show "Tiny Toon Adventures" there were the two lead characters Buster Bunny and Babs Bunny. Two lead characters with nearly identical silhouettes. The writers knew that Buster needed a female counterpart/love interest, and that could only be accomplished with another rabbit, and Bugs Bunny--from the show's parent program--already established what rabbits looked like in this show. Thus, some tweaks were made to make Babs visually different on some level, but their contrast is largely in their personalities)

Characters with silhouettes instantly recognizable on a national or global scale are few and far between. And not every popular character has a perfect silhouette. What's most important is that the character is unique in their own cast.