Friday 12 feb
We watched some videos where they talked through what the difference between animation and creating a believable character performance. It was clear that in the films we saw about Pixar e.g. Nemo and Disney films e.g. Tarzan, there was a lot of physics involved. Learning how the body moves wether it was a fish or a strapping jungle man was imperative to making animation believable. The aim is so people who view the production don’t think it is a computer generated animation but that it actually looks real.
If two characters do the same thing then the results should be different as they have different personas. It’s all in the little signals/details which add up to create a character. It always helps to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to embody what it would be like so you can better animate different characters.
We also watched a video which talked about acting and how method acting was a technique famous actors would use in order to really get inside the head of a character. With 3D animation one would have to get into the mindset of many characters quickly as one would have to work on many different characters at different points. This is a skill needed to work in a studio. Being able to be diverse is key. Tips included: thinking through what you were going to do before actually acting. To plan it our and use reference ideas from a variety of places to build on what you were going to personally act out.
When creating the animation reference I will act out, it was advised to over exaggerate the performance as it is easier to reign it in than to add more exaggeration to the reference. Also, try to change the context fo the original film as this is a new take on the audio clip being used.
Our task was to find three diferenct audio clips from films that we would want to use as a reference to then act out and animate and memorable performance for my showreel.
I decided to use clips from the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Con-Air and Bruce Almighty. I thought these clips were funny and had a lot of room to play with for ideas for the performance.