Opposite page Still from
Jeron Braxton’s short film,
Octane.
Clockwise from left
Alternative logo work, still
from short film Glucose,
and Jeron in pixel form.
JUNE 2019 CHARACTER DESIGN WORKOUT
COMPUTERARTS.CREATIVEBLOQ.COMJ
eron Braxton is entirely self-taught in the
world of animation and visual arts, yet at
just 24 years old he’s already made a
name for himself through work that’s both
nonlinear yet somehow familiar. At last
year’s Sundance Film Festival, he took
home the Short Film Jury Award for Animation
for his brilliant short Glucose: an occasionally
surreal, always powerful exploration of police
violence, our relationship with the digital
world, and internet culture and the loneliness it
can engender.
Braxton got into animation as a teenager
when he wanted to make videos for the music
he was making. “I was always drawing for as
long as I could remember and I sort of stuck
with it,” he says. “Not to say I was a good
drawer, but I was always drawing comic
books. I’d create these robust worlds with all
these characters.” He decided against going to
art school, taking one semester as he was
already “five years deep” into creating
animation. “[Art schools] turn their noses up at
anything commercial or palatable, but I’m not
Braxton learned all he knows about
his choice of soware, Blender,
through internet tutorials on sites like
instructibles.com. His advice for those
using digital tools for character design
is to “get out of the uncanny valley,”
he says. “If you’re making stuff that
feels creepy and you have some skill in
drawing you should use image tracing:
you take an image and 3D model
around that to get a more stylised look.”
Braxton adds that it’s crucial not to
fall into the trap of believing that as an
artist, you should constantly be on to
the next thing. “I feel like at times, we
creatives think that once we produce
one idea, we have to move on and do
something new, especially with 3D
modeling where you feel like once you
make a character, it’s locked in. But if
you create something and it’s not quite
there, or your skill evolves, it’s okay to
revisit it. What’s not okay is to sele
and get stuck. You can always revise
things, which means you continue to
explore and evolve your style.”JERON
ON THE
UNCANNY
VALLEYabout to get penalised for making the art that
I wanna make,” he says.
Where Braxton’s work is often so
compelling is in his explorations of big, difficult
issues: things like the Black American
experience through more accessibly playful,
colourful, dynamic animations. “With Glucose, I
wanted to make something that was sweet on
the surface, but with dark undertones,” he says.
“For a lot of people some of these themes are a
hard pill to swallow, so the animation and style
makes it more palatable. If you’re captivated by
the design and by the movement, you’re more
receptive to the message. Even though my
work has a political message, I think back to the
happy-go-lucky 2D stuff I like.”
Braxton’s advice to people getting into
animation is to “tell the stories you want to tell
that are important to you. You need to stay
inspired to be creative and if you’re not then
you probably shouldn’t do it. You’ll have to
invest a lot of time: it doesn’t matter if people
are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the story.
If you wanna tell it, tell it.”NAIVE-STYLE 3D ANIMATION with JERON BRAXTON
Above A character called Matrius.