The embodied experience of costume in digital character creation: Developing body- and material-led characters

This research report presents a post-doctoral research project which explores how the experience of wearing physical costumes leads to ideas for digital characters’ visual design, movement and dialogue in animation and gaming. In such fields, costume design is merged into the character design process, with animators or character designers acting as the creators of a character and their costume, ‘giving life’ to the character. From a costume design point of view, when the character’s physicality and especially their movement is developed and animated, the multisensorial and embodied effects of costume should also be considered. The research was conducted through workshops for game and costume design students at Aalto University, Finland. In the workshops and in the analysis of the collected data, I specifically employed Sally E. Dean’s costume-led and body-centred concept of ‘aware wearing’. This study adds to similar existing methods researching the relationship between body, costume and material. In this study, the body and its multisensorial effects are placed as central elements in the design process of digital costumes to see how wearing everyday and historical clothes aids digital character development. The data collection methods were video and audio recording, photography and online questionnaires. Thematic content analysis of the transcribed materials, thick description of videorecording, as well as comparative analysis of photographs from students’ drawings and written notes showed that identical garments provoke different embodied experiences based on an individual’s unique perspective. Material, sound, temperature and texture against the skin emerged as noteworthy aspects from the embodied garment experiments, triggering seamless transformation into new characters. The study shows that multidimensional understanding of costume not only enriches the creative process, but also highlights the importance of somatic awareness in developing memorable digital characters and immersive digital worlds.