Industry practice week 7

 Week 7

This week I am starting to work on more designs for the visual novel, at the start of this week we had a meeting in order to discuss who would be desining what going forward, and in this meeting I was allocated the character design for the character representing PTSD, the bedroom environment designs and the park ending scene background.


Character design:

In order to properly design a character around the idea of PTSD, I'm going to have to do some research into different ways it effects someone's mental health and how it can present its self to both people with it and people around the person suffering from it. 

According to Better Health channel, PTSD can show in four main ways "Re-living the traumatic event and recurring memories, flashbacks or vivid nightmares. There may be intense emotional or physical reactions when reminded of the event including sweating, heart palpitations, anxiety and panic","Avoiding reminders of the event, such as thoughts, feelings, people, places, activities or situations that remind them of the event","negative changes in feelings and thoughts" and finally "Being overly alert or 'wound up'".  All four of these different symptoms are generally present when someone is suffering from PTSD. With the character I am designing, I will need to look into different ways somone with PTSD might present themselves, for example, if someone suffereing from PTSD doesn't like physical contact, they might wear long sleeve tops and hoodies along with trousers. 

In order to come up with ideas for the character design, I will have a look at different fictional characters that are supposed to be suffering from PTSD and looking at how the design has been done to accurately encapulate the feeling of someone suffering from this mental illness. 

Two fictional characters that present symptoms of PTSD and handle it in very different ways are Tachibana Hibiki from Symphogear, and her alternate counterpart from Symphogear XDU Tachibana Hibiki Another. Both of these characters experience the same traumatic event, but they both handle the trauma from it in vastly different ways. At the start of both of their stories, they're present at a concert which is attacked mid way through, causing huge loss of life due to an alien force called the noise. The whole event ending with Hibiki and Hibiki Another as the lone survivors in their respective versions of the timeline. 
After the traumatic event, Hibiki tries to move on, covering up her trauma with a smile, however throughout the first two seasons of the anime, she displays several cases of survivor's guilt, which is a symptom of PTSD, and constantly seems to be trying to be "make up" for being the only one that survived the disaster. She only really starts to recover after finally opening up and talking about her traumatic experience with people that were there to support her such as her friends and adult rolemodels. 
In Hibiki Another's case however, she displayed a much more negative outlook on everything, as after the event, her family and friends moved away from the area, leaving her with little to no support. Throughout the progression of the game, she shows a much more aggressive version of survivors guilt, placing herself in way more reckless situations almost as though she had a death wish, even knowing her life is on the line, she would still do it without a second thought. It's not until much later on in the game that she's able to start opening up about her experience when she meets mainline Hibiki's friend and eventually reunites with her friend that moved away.

After looking into both of these characters, it is very evident that PTSD is able to present it's self very differently even in similar people and how much difference it makes to have people to support you through your struggles.
Using the information from my character case studies, I will start to put together some simple character designs exploring different outfits that the character might be wearing, for this I will also make some moodboards of the characters I discussed in order to get a better idea of what they might wear.


Initial sketches



For my initial sketches for my character design for the PTSD character, I was thinking about the way the character would be presented based on my character research, as I want them to look a bit more drawnback and covered up. In order to do this, I was thinking about different kinds of clothes, that would fit with the initial character design before they start to look a bit more distorted. I wanted to go with longer sleeve clothing with either all or most of the character's legs covered up.

Of the three initial sketches that I came up with for the design, the first one is my favourite as it feels like it fits in best with the general theme of our storyline, with the characters based on the different mental health disorders initially presenting themselves as friends to the main character.

References:

Anon, 2022. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) [online]. Better Health Channel: Victoria State Government. Available at: https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd#rpl-skip-link [08/11/2024]

Soulx88, 2024. Hibiki Tachibana [online]. Fandom: Fandom. Available at: https://symphogear.fandom.com/wiki/Hibiki_Tachibana [08/11/2024]

GotenSakruauchi, 2024. Hibiki Tachibana (Another) [online]. Fandom: Fandom. Available at: https://symphogear.fandom.com/wiki/Hibiki_Tachibana_(Another) [08/11/2024]

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