Artist Portfolio: Brittany Myers
Gary Evans finds out how the American character designer landed her dream job at Netflix Animation working alongside her childhood hero
We find out how the US character designer landed her dream job at Netflix Animation working alongside her childhood hero.
Los Angeles, 2018. Brittany Myers is starting work at Netflix Animation. Netflix hasn’t publicly announced its new animation division, so Brittany joins what is for now a small team on Sunset Boulevard. She’ll be designing characters for a film called Over the Moon, directed by Brittany’s favourite artist growing up, the artist who made her want to be a character designer in first place: illustrator and animator Glen Keane.
Over the Moon has a script – it’s about a teenage girl who builds a rocket ship to meet the mythical goddess who lives on the moon – but almost no artwork. This is where Brittany comes in.
Some directors provide their character designers with precise instructions, right down to the style of haircut and particular items of clothing, with reference pictures of people the character should resemble. Sometimes the instructions are less precise, more abstract.
Brittany previously worked on a project where she was told to design a character who was “a little spunky.” Too little instruction can leave you feeling overwhelmed by possibility.
Too much instruction is limiting. “With Glen,” Brittany says, “it’s kind of a mixture.”
Brittany gets to work on Over the Moon’s main character: 13-yearold Fei Fei. Glen gives a couple of visual instructions – the story is set in China – but the rest of his brief is about Fei Fei’s personality… those more abstract instructions. Brittany needs to turn these verbal instructions into character designs that tell a story.
PEOPLE WATCHING
Brittany learned a valuable lesson at a very young age. She was 14 or 15, and her dad knew somebody who knew somebody who’d worked as an artist at Disney. Brittany sent this artist her work. She still had plenty to learn technique-wise, but the artist said that didn’t matter – this would come with practice. The artist believed that Brittany would make it as a pro because of the way she used pose and gesture. She was already using pictures to tell stories.
Brittany says that you can learn to tell stories visually by observing people. She likes (used to like!) going to coffee shops to people-watch. She studied, briefly, at the California Institute of the Arts (Calarts), where they would bring in dancers and children to model and neither group would stop moving. The challenge was to capture that movement in a static drawing. “It forces you to focus on the feeling more than anything,” the artist says.
[When drawing people who are moving] it forces you to focus on the feeling more than anything
Brittany makes use of pose, expression and body language to convey feeling. She often gives her characters an object to interact with or an action to do. Even the character’s lines and shapes say something about who they are. It’s about “taking moments and making it feel like it’s an actual person.”
OVER THE MOON
Brittany is experimenting with possible designs for Fei Fei, asking herself: “What kind of style of film do we want to create? How pushed should the style be? Should it go more realistic? Should I go more stylised, more extreme?”
Brittany picks out little moments from Over the Moon’s script and illustrates them. She doesn’t just do static standing poses of Fei Fei. She draws Fei Fei riding her bike or hugging her pet bunny, for example. She wants these images to look dynamic, to say something about Fei Fei’s character.
She presents these images to Glen and the team for feedback, then takes the team’s notes and continues to develop Fei Fei until she has several pages of designs. On some projects, this back and forth can go on for months, but not here. Glen (“amazing eye, a master”) looks over of Brittany’s early designs and picks the one he wants go with. Still, this drawing of Fei Fei will look quite different from the Fei Fei in the final movie.
“It’s a job at the end of the day. It’s not art for you. It’s art for the project, it’s art for the studio … You can’t have an ego about your work.”
Now Brittany is working on turnarounds – Fei Fei seen from multiple angles, literally turning around. Fei Fei has “pushed proportions, very long legs.” The artist is trying to work out how Fei Fei’s silhouette changes as the character moves about.
PERSONALITY THROUGH SHAPES
Brittany and the team put Fei Fei in a line-up with her mom and dad (“a good way to see how they play off of each other”). The dad is made up
It’s a job at the end of the day. It’s not art for you. It’s art for the project…
of edges and angular shapes because his personality is “much more scientific and grounded in facts.” The mom has a similar in personality to Fei Fei – she also believes in the mythical goddess on the moon – so her shapes are rounder, freer.
Brittany isn’t just working on visualising Over the Moon’s main characters. She’s designing minor characters, and doing what’s known as “crowd work” – animation’s version of the background actor, the extra. Brittany says some character designers don’t like doing crowd work, but she sees it as an opportunity to experiment and learn. For her, crowd work is where it all started.
CHARACTER BUILDING
Brittany grew up in small-town Illinois. She was always drawing, but didn’t considered a career in art until she saw the Disney film Tangled. She was 12 or 13, and really liked the main character Rapunzel. A bit of online research led her to the Rapunzel’s designs, drawn by Glen Keane.
She had an internship at Disney between leaving high school and joining the character animation course at Calarts in 2015. Most first-year students aren’t sure which area of entertainment art they want to work in. For Brittany, it was always character design. After the first year of the
I almost always start with a reference board to help inspire the product
four-year course, she received a job offer from Sony Pictures Animation: “I was like: I’m going to go work and make money learning instead of spending so much money learning.”
She worked on various projects that never came out, but she also got to contribute to Oscar-winning Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse, mainly doing crowd work. “It can be really fun because it’s characters that don’t get as much scrutiny. You’re designing tons and tons of different people and you want to hit every type of person: body type, gender, race. It feels like the ultimate character-design challenge. You’re doing the biggest practice session you could be doing.”
Brittany is working with Jin Kim, Over the Moon’s character supervisor,
I was like: I’m going to go work and make money learning instead of spending so much money learning
to put the finishing touches to characters and think about out how they might change once they’re computer-generated. Now it’s over to Leo Sanchez, the character modeller: “It’s a lot of problem solving because once you take a 2D drawing into a 3D program, you have to figure out some things that may not work.” Brittany’s part on the project is coming to an end, over a year after it began. But how did it begin?
STRONG ONLINE PORTFOLIO
Brittany posted online fan art of Ariel from The Little Mermaid. Glen Keane saw it (“somehow, I don’t know how”) and offered her a job. It was the same thing with Sony, which is why Brittany stresses the importance of a good
portfolio. The artist suggests going online and looking up the portfolios of artists who do what you want to do, and note how they’re structured and what they’ve included. She also advises artists who are starting out to check out art-of movie books.
The big decision is whether your portfolio presents you as a specialist or an all-rounder. Brittany says it’s easier to find work if you can do a bit of everything: visual development, environments, storyboards. But you don’t want to get hired to do something you don’t like or can’t actually do. Brittany always saw herself as a specialist – an out-and-out character designer – so that’s how she presented herself. But if you’re going to specialise in one thing then you better be really good at it.
SHOW OFF YOUR SKILLS
There aren’t many jobs for character designers, Brittany says. Competition is tough. This is why you need to research portfolios of similar artists – that’s who you’re competing against.
You should include a variety of work, not just finished, polished pieces. On the job, characters designers have to design characters very quickly, so show your quick sketches, your working out. You could have a full page of different designs of a character, alongside the finished piece. Add a page of different facial expressions, a page of different poses from different angles. You can even include references to show where the idea came from how you developed it. Then you have to be brave and get your work out there. Because you never know who might see it.
“It sounds like a lot. And it is. A portfolio is hard work– it takes a while. Even if you start with just one page, at least that’s something you can email to somebody and ask for feedback on how to go forward. It’s just about starting, I think.”
Even if you start with just one page, at least that’s something you can email to somebody and ask for feedback…