Escape Studios: Specialism Exercise

Planning:

For the Final Submission of our Animation Specialism unit, I wanted to practice doing an acting with a dialogue.
I chose a piece of dialogue from Birdman I quite liked, as it had a lot of opportunities to practice emotional changes and animating breaths.

As I had changed my idea rather late in the Unit, I decided to keep the concept for this one simple.

My previous shot had gotten too ambitious and complicated, and as lots of time was spent brainstorming concepts for it, I wasn't as far enough into the blocking stage as I wanted to be.
Thus in order to meet the deadline, I decided to use my back-up choice, and have the character mainly sitting on a sofa.

In order to plan the performance, I wrote out the dialogue and tried imaging what subtext could possibly be behind it. I also tried hard to get in the mindset of the character, thinking about what possible backstory she could have.
I would also draw quick thumbnails to help figure out what main pose would describe the overall mood.
I kept my notebook close by throughout, and if I had any ideas, I would quickly jot them down.



Breaking down the Dialogue



Exploring Character History

When I would struggled to draw out thumbnails for the moments between the key poses, I would record some quick reference to explore ideas.
I would let the audio loop several times, and try different approaches to get some sense of timing and action. If I saw any poses I that had potential, I would try to draw them simplified for notes. And if I saw any interesting timing, I would cut the clip and add it to a video where I collected certain motions.
The problem I had here was that I couldn't film one overall take I was satisfied with. Thus the blocking stage took longer that I wanted it to, due to trying to piece together the different things I wanted.




Some thumbnails



Throughout the process if I would become unsatisfied with the progress of the shot, I would go back to shoot reference again. I would also ask for opinions from peers, who would also help record their interpretations.
I also kept a list of notes I always wanted to keep in mind, collected from lectures and talks that where taking place during the assignment time.





Notes

Blocking:

Here are some playblasts of the early stages in blocking.

Initial Layout

Initially the idea was to have a medium shot, in order to focus on the face. But I decided later to have the whole body seen, in order to play with different ways to emphasise the emotions with the body, instead of having the character nearly completely locked in space.



Block Pass

Thanks to feedback and advice for tutors and peers, I would gradually define more the main poses of the shot, which had started off rather vaguely.

Spline Pass



Final:


https://syncsketch.com/sketch/5e9feba7ac57/#338106