#performanceworkshop

Live action mystery box test 

In this week’s session with Sarah we acted out our mystery box storyboards. I really enjoyed this session and started to feel more confident doing live action tests. One thing I have definitely learned this year is that reference is very important to animation, and you most likely needed it most of the time, if not always.

This short scene will alongside my animatic, will be a very good source my stop motion shoot. The only thing I could have improved was the running at the end as I did not seem as terrified as I should have been. However, due to the space we recorded there wasn’t really anywhere to run to. 

With this in mind I will have to find some other form of reference, but depending on the outcome I may not even include the running if i feel like the action of the puppet falling over is enough to convey that he is in shock/fear.

This week we began a performance workshop with Sarah Perry, a performance coach who has worked in many Hollywood movies and is a regular lecturer at NUA. These workshops are so we can become more confident acting out animation sequences and encourages us to use ourselves as reference. I really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to future sessions when we begin acting out our mystery box sequences, it will definitely help considering my best clips from the introduction tasks were the ones were I used a lot of video reference. 

Some basic principles we learned were Laban movements a theory by Barbara Adrian. Laban movements is a framework for observing changes in movement, ranging from hand gestures to complex actions. It is made up of these key principles.

Body – What we move with,  Structure, Posture, Range of Motion.

Effort – How we move using time, weight, space and flow.

Space – Where are we when we are moving? What influences movements, environment, objects, people how we interact with the space around us.

Shape – Shape and still shape forms. Physical manifestations through the body,  reflections of emotions.

Motion Factors – each consisting of two elements;

Space – Direct and Indirect

Time – Quick and Sustained

Weight – Strong and Light

8 Basic Efforts

Pressing – strong, sustained, direct                                     Gliding – light, sustained, direct

Dabbing – light, quick, direct                                                Punching – strong, quick, direct

Flicking – light, quick, indirect                                              Wringing – strong, sustained, indirect

Floating – light, sustained, indirect                                     Slashing – strong, quick, indirect

We used the 8 basic efforts a lot during an exercise were Sarah called out each effort in random order and we had to match it with an action. This was really engraved in my head and will be really helpful when it comes to creating key body shapes in my mystery box sequence.

I decided to look at Charlie Chaplin movies due to the fact that he is an iconic silent actor, master at conveying stories with his body language. Something I will heavily rely on when animating my mystery box clip. I looked at a scene from the movie ‘The Circus ’ from 1928. Chaplin wrote, produced and directed this movie which earned him his first Academy Award. Obviously in this time period movies did not have sound so Chaplin had to rely on his acting alone meaning that he is very expressive with his body. Chaplin relies a lot on his facial expressions, however because my puppet does not have a face I had to look out for his body language which is very exaggerated and involves a lot of his arms. Which always seem to be in use. 

This type of exaggeration Chaplin iconically uses was very influential in cartoons as this sort of body language can be seen in many rubber hose and Hanna Barbera classics from the 40′s and 50′s.