Another class completed

Its break time! A time to relax from study after a term full of acting in animation. Yesterday was the last day on AM Fall Term 2008 and I think I am already missing AM for the holidays.
After the pantomime assignment in this term we had to animate a dialog. Since this was an introduction to dialog, we were not supposed to animate the facial controls and so it showed how it is challenging to show the acting and emotions through the whole body even without facial expressions. Only the jaw and eyes could be animated, so I wanted to take full advantage of it to push the emotion displayed through his body.

Here is the shot. Please Note that it is still a work in progress. In the next term I will be working on the facial controls and lip-sync and make it final. The "final" in the video below indicates the final assignment for the term.



Ah! Acting is SO difficult even though you know its not a theater stage that you are presenting it on. I like to see how we unknowingly do some things in front of the camera which we might not have imagined if we were bringing it all only from our memory or imagination. This is the video reference I settled on before going into animating it.



I hope to get the best out of this shot once Class 4 starts, for now its break time ! :)
- Chai'

Pantomime

Last few weeks I have been working on this Pantomime test at AM. For this assignment we have to plan a shot with clear change of beats in the animation, also being pantomime, all the acting has to be conveyed through actions and the body.
I enjoyed doing this one a lot right from the planning and video reference to the final polish.
Here is my final test -




Now over to some Dialog Animation :)

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.