AM Class 3 Begins

Week one began and is now over of class 3, intro to acting. Last term was all about the body mechanics and now we take all that we learned from that and apply to acting. Each step that we have taken has built us up slowly to this part of our education. and for me this is the most exciting part. I love trying to bring characters to life and through planning, research and reference I hope to do so.

Another term, another mentor. This term my mentor is Ryan Donoghue. He is an animator from Rhythm and Hues and also worked on futurama for 4 years. Our first lecture class with him was very laid back and fun. A part of the class was dedicated to showing clips from some of the movies that Ryan worked on. We even got to see some deleted scenes!!

For our first assignment we can do what ever we want!! With limitations of course. It has to show two beats of emotions. After hours of planning and throwing around ideas, i finally came up with an idea. A little kid at the beach. He is planning on building the best sand castle ever but things dont go according to plan and when his castle crumbles he changes from extremely happy to a childish temper, where he pouts and hits the bucket. There are so many challenges to address in this little 250 frame piece. Sand is possible the biggest challenge. I have to do research on how to make sand crumble. Another thing to look at is the age of the character. He is only around four and I am nowhere near that number. This is the great part of acting. I got to take a bucket and some friends and go play in the sand, with many people staring at me. It was very embarressing but so much fun to get into a character and play the part. Here is some of the reference footage that I shot.


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After I shot the reference, I then began to do my thumbnails. The first page was the concept page where I wrote out all of the main details of the piece. Like the setting, the age of the boy, what he was feeling, where he was before the main action took place, etc. Then after I established all of the background info I went through all of my reference for inspiration and took some of the best clips and translated it into thumbnail drawings. Here is the concept page and thumbnail page.


The animation for my first acting piece is going to be subtle but still challenging. This is going to be an exciting term with a lot of creative though. I cant thank everyone enough for how awesome they have been and all of the great help. Week 2 is all about the blocking and I'm looking forward to the first e critique and getting right into it. Have a fantastic week everyone.

Also, some exciting news, according to time.com there is some talk that Wall-e may be nominated for best picture at the Oscars! The only animation ever to have been nominated was "Beauty and the Beast" in 1991. It's not offical, and more than unlikely because they have a category that is dedicated to animated films, but it is being talked about as a possibility, which I felt was very awesome. Here is the link to the article. Enjoy! http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1820824,00.html?imw=Y