Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Class 3 : "Intro to Acting" starts

Hey everyone,
This post is coming quite a bit late. I started with class3 a month back and I love all the stuff is going on. If I had to write all the things that I learnt in this past month, I would complete a full notebook with it. Acting in animation is one of the most difficult things to understand, it being different from acting in live action. Animator has to not only act but keep in mind that the physics, the body mechanics are working right, the acting choices are perfect, it is free of cliches and so on. It is said that an animator's job is more difficult than that of a stage actor. Since I know little about stage acting, I dont know all the difficulties that a stage actor has to face, but am beginning to understand the thought process. An actor has to understand the scene, his character, the moment, the surroundings, clarity, acting choices, expression, voice and the characters around. But he never has to worry about the physics, the movement and balance of the body because its natural being a human being. Here is the challenge a character animator has to face. He has to do all that an actor has to do, plus the fact that he has to make the audience believe that its not a drawing or an image but a real character - alive !

The Lectures this term have been focusing on acting and are simply great. I have a new Mentor - Mike Belzer. He is an amazing animator and the fact that he has been an animator for really long, he started with stop-motion animation and worked on Nightmare before Christmas. The last 10 years or so he has been at Disney Studios and he has recently finished work on Disney's latest animation feature, Bolt. I am very lucky to have such an experienced animator to help me through this acting class. The first day of class3 when I got to know Mike is my mentor, I was extremely happy to know I have a really amazing animator to look at my work and tear it apart ! Here is a link to an excerpt from the meet-the-pro QnA at cg-char website where Mike answered some questions.

I'll write about my new assignment this term soon.

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