Role Play

Over the past two weeks we have been required to draw upon our theatrical skills from deep within, and use these to create our own skits, which were to be filmed and ultimately animated.

The aim of this exercise wasn't to rotoscope our own live action movement, rather it was about feeling the movement in our own bodies and understanding how we can push them further, so they can be effectively translated onscreen. I found this particularly useful with working out the overall timing and action, and what would be most effective to get the story told in the simplest way possible.

For these exercises, the story scenarios were loosely prescribed to what we had randomly drawn from an envelope passed around the classroom.

The first drawcard presented me with a scenario of a person drinking an energy drink and reacting to it. I learnt a lot of lessons with this exercise, mostly on how important it was to 'overact' to make the message clear for the viewer. I also rediscovered the art of anticipation and how it can be just as effective as the action itself in getting the message across.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to finish the entire animation, due to the sheer amount of frames I needed to animate - another lesson learnt here, keep it simple, the less time and frames it takes to tell a story, the better! Here is the animation, the last section still being keys.

In the next exercise we were required to add another character to the mix. I used two birds as a guise for a flirtatious interplay scenario. In this exercise I learnt an enormous amount about timing between interacting characters, which could be likened to a game of tennis, each character taking their turn to act and react in sync with the other. I'm still working away at this one, and will hopefully have the finished version up in the next week.