Robert Valley is an animator, designer, director and storyboard artist from Canada. One of the things that he is most well known for is animation in many of Gorillaz animated music videos. Jamie Hewlett's character designs from the show had an impact on Valley's own style of character design, as seen in some of his most recent projects.
He has worked as a character designer on Motorcity, an animated series on Disney XD set in a futuristic version of the state of Detroit, focusing heavily on cars and action.
The show was animated in Flash, Maya and After Effect (with backgrounds made in photoshop), the former working extremely well with Valley's character style.
This style makes it easier to animate characters in flash, with things largely keep the shame kind of shapes and angles from different positions. Heads would be animated separately from the rest of the body, reusing already made assets rather than hand drawing each different position.
One of the things that attracted me to this style was how angular it was - a lot of childrens' animations use a lot more curves with softer characters having a safer, more friendly feel to them. Valley's approach is suitable for an action cartoon, using ore edgy and lively shapes.
Another show he designed characters for was Tron: Uprising.
Tron had a much more science fiction vibe to it, and although similar in basic shapes, Valley has changed his style to something sleeker, taking out some of the sharper lines and angles. This works very well, and the designs look just as appealing as those from Motorcity.
Robert Valley's style helped to influence some of m designs in an earlier project this year, and even though they were not designs that I chose to go through with, it is definitely a style I would love to explore further in future projects.
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