Mei’s inspiration board is rich. There’s a ton of stuff there. There’s animation of Amy Adams from Enchanted, from Read or Die anime, pictures of Zoe Salander in glasses, Rapuntsel from Tangled. It’s a lot of various stuff and it all fits the right mood.

After all the information is gathered, David start to play with the character’s rig and explore different poses. He tires different stuff, goes through various poses. He tires to find the limitations of the character and understand its possibilities. He plays a lot with blackout models. Then the search for the right pose begins.

During his talk at GDC 2016 David said that the most important thing he learned at his school was “how to give and receive criticism”.

The animator looks at all the character poses of other characters. They look like superheroes. All like straight A. Shoulders are back, chest pushed out. Mei did not work with that type of pose. It was awful, really. So, animator tried to bust out as many idle poses as possible. There were a ton of those. He used the hands, the legs and tried to find something cool. He wanted the character to feel a little off balance. It worked wonderfully and everyone on the team liked the new idle pose.

Then he did some work with the running, which was done in the style of the character. Movement brought a lot of new visual additions to Mei as a character. Every movement of the arm or leg, jiggling of the backpack and so on – it all felt right. Mei moved soft, floating in space.