An04 - Introduction to Acting: Project 01 - Pantomime - A silent but deadly tale of trauma
In the character animation world, communicating emotions and convincing an audience that an imaginary character is real is the biggest challenge an animator can face. The goal is to bring the character to “life”, and to teach that skill the class is broken into two projects…
Project 1 - Pantomime where the character needs to act out a specific emotion without any words or sound.
Project 2 - Dialog - where the character speaks and moves at the same time.
Pantomime acting was popularized during the age of silent movies where a story had to be acted out and communicated without any sound at all since the technology didn’t yet exist. Charlie Chaplin is one of the most recognizable faces in history, and his pantomime acting still inspires animators to this day.
For my first project I decided to try and have the character move through a range of emotions… Shock, realization, horror disgust and ultimately succumb to something terrible. As usual I started with a written idea…
Then some very rough sketches to capture the kinds of poses I would need…
Then comes the reference video… this was fun to shoot LOL… because this was my first time working with an actual face on a character, I added the two closeup reference videos on the right hand side of the frame… I’m not good enough to act out the body language AND the face expressions at the same time, so I broke the challenge into parts. The left side shows body acting and the right side shows facial expressions.
The first blocking pass was really challenging… facial controls are really complex, and it took a lot of time to get my head around how to build the poses. This was also challenging because I was working with TWO characters at the same time. The perpetrator would have minimal movement and expressions but he still needed to “sell” the fart. hee hee
The feedback on blocking was really positive from my Mentor, Ethan Hurd and it only took one more pass before I moved into splining and refining stage… The end result of definitely “sells the fart” hee hee
Faces are hard… and communicating emotions is FUN… and more importantly… farts are always funny when they happen to someone else.
