Christine Peters: a real character

“Eleven goes into Phil Mitchell territory very easily,” laughs animator Christine Peters, discussing the challenges of character design and how the subtlest slip of a digital brush – the spacing between the features, the size of the eyes – has the potential to turn the shaven-headed waif from Stranger Things into the former hard man from the soap EastEnders.

I had a stack of paper and I kept drawing this teddy bear over and over again, trying to get it to move, even though I had no idea how to do it.

As the 2D lead at London animation studio Blind Pig, Peters has spent almost a decade honing her skills in character design. It’s not only iconic existing characters, like the cast of Stranger Things, that she’s turned into animated versions of themselves – she’s also helped realise a host of colourful personalities from scratch, like a swarm of belligerent bees and a judo-chopping squirrel for Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut, and a naysaying inner critic for Arden University.  

Peters' character sheet from when she was trying to nail Eleven, from Stranger Things.

With a penchant for “fine, crisp lines”, animé and old-school Disney-esque styles, Peters can trace her inspiration back to childhood cartoons like Tom & Jerry (“although they’re really un-PC now”) and Looney Tunes: “I still refer back to Wile E. Coyote. The character, the expression of movement – it’s all there.”

Despite taking an early interest in the craft at the tender age of five - “I had a stack of paper and I kept drawing this teddy bear over and over again, trying to get it to move, even though I had no idea how to do it” – she opted to study architecture over animation at university. 

It's drilled into you that you’ve got to have the right lines, the right scale; I like getting it just the right weight.

Part of the course involved 3D animation: essentially following a camera around a space and trying to build a narrative. Although a long way from the character design work she’s become known for, that brush with the craft gave Peters her epiphany. “I thought, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.” And she has architecture school to thank for her “nerdy obsession” with the more technical aspects of her craft, such as linework. "It’s drilled into you that you’ve got to have the right lines, the right scale; I like getting it just the right weight."

The final version of Eleven. 

After struggling to build up a reel, she won a project for Architecture for Humanity, a charity which tasked designers and architects with designing a postcard concept to make London a better city. Although the winning design, a trampoline ‘highway’ spanning the city, never came to fruition after being leaked to the press, Peters’ animated teaser got shown on the BBC – and ultimately landed her a job at Blind Pig.  

Since then, she’s risen through the ranks as a 2D animator, with work spanning fine-line sketches to ink drawings, watercolour paintings and, most recently in the BAFTA-longlisted short film, Chado, risograph prints – aka digital screen printing. 

When it comes to the tools of her trade, Peters says she’s happiest using ‘traditional’ software like TVPaint (a 2D program for frame-by-frame animation): “It’s like working on the pages of a drawing pad, only digital”, alongside Toon Boom for rigging characters. 

Peters created a real-life zoetrope for an innovative Nissan spot.

But one of her favourite projects, Nissan’s Cells, used another, more unorthodox animation tool: an electric car. “Dark Horses came up with the idea of creating a real-life zoetrope, and it was up to me to make it happen,” explains Peters. That meant designing an animation sequence to be displayed on a 450m-long runway, that would be captured, frame by frame, by a camera attached to the front of a Nissan Ariya as it drove along. 

It was incredible to see the frames of the animation sequence I’d drawn along a runway 450 metres long.

“There were so many technical challenges that had to be worked out beforehand – like how fast the camera shutter speed needed to be whilst travelling at 60mph to achieve the zoetrope effect,” says Peters, who designed her own digital paintbrushes to create 150 illustrations of the car alongside traditional Japanese kanji script. “But it was incredible to see the frames of the animation sequence I’d drawn along a runway 450 metres long.”

Nissan was a “career-defining” moment for Peters; having Winona Ryder sign off on her character sheet for the Stranger Things Season 1 recap animation was another. That job also stood out as one of the few occasions that Peters got to write her own script, after Netflix approached Blind Pig with a loose brief for a 10 to 30-second animation to tease on social media ahead of the new season. 

Peters was tasked with scripting the recap animation for Stranger Things, Season 1. 

More used to designing characters from scratch, Peters found that turning beloved – and universally recognisable – TV characters into animated versions of themselves presented its own challenges: “You need to tread a fine line between the uncanny valley [effect] and having a tangible link to [reality].” And, as the Eleven-Phil Mitchell transition highlights, exaggerating a feature or facial shape can change your character’s entire identity. 

The tendency is to take it to the extreme, but you don’t want to end up with someone who looks like he’s going to stab you.

When it comes to designing characters from scratch, Peters has developed her own unique process – and it always starts with a name.  “Even if it’s just a tiny little creature in the scene, it's got to have a name. There’s a lot of Cecils, Cedrics, Stevens and Humphreys. I’ve got a tendency to name them how I want them to behave.” 

A case in point? The sardonic, snooty star of Blind Pig’s recent spot for Arden University, in which a woman’s inner critic springs to life, sneering at her attempts to get into higher education when there’s so much housework still to do. “They’re all going to laugh at you, dear girl!” he smirks. Could he have been anything other than a Tarquin?

For this Arden University spot Peters created a character she named Tarquin. Who behaves just as a Tarquin would. 

Movement is the next step in bringing a character to life; their gait, poses, gestures and facial expressions. In the early days of her career, Peters used to go to life drawing classes, or sit in a café and sketch people (“it’s the cheapest life drawing class you’ll ever go to!”), and even now tends to act out all the character’s movements in front of a mirror, recording herself on her phone. 

We’ve used AI in a couple of projects, and it always just looks like you’ve used AI.

And it’s important to remember that sometimes, less is more. Peters oversaw the initial design work for Tarquin and realised they were making the character too villainous, when he needed to be more like an art critic. "The tendency is to take it to the extreme, but you don’t want to end up with someone who looks like he’s going to stab you,” laughs Peters. “Seeing [the character] honed down and down, until it’s in its purest form of what [the client] wanted to portray – that’s a really fun thing.” 

Of course, some briefs, like a recent Instagram collab between food influencer What Willy Cook and Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut cereal, call for the exact opposite: dialled up, larger-than-life characters like a furious swarm of bees and a spoon-wielding squirrel – and that’s all part of the joy of animation, says Peters. 

This Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut campaign featured a judo-chopping squirrel and angry bees.

As she approaches a decade in the industry, what does she feel are the major factors shaping its future? Has the recent explosion in AI impacted her craft as an animator? “I wish it had,” she admits, explaining that clients are increasingly looking to lean on AI to cut costs, but the tech isn’t quite there yet. 

I can honestly say, it’s an absolute joy to have my hobby as my job. No two projects are the same.

"We’ve used AI in a couple of projects, and it always just looks like you’ve used AI. If you want to do something specific, like applying a shadow to the side of something, you need a whole pipeline, you need a whole department of people working this out and writing code to put into a program. I can't wait to work with these tools, but they are not yet for public consumption.”