Jan. 10, 1930 – Dec. 16, 2009
“You know what? Mickey Mouse is not a brand. Mickey is a mouse.”
VILLAINS – REDUX
My craft notes last month regarding the lack of colorful villains in today’s megabudget animated features drew a lot of response, and I thank everybody who wrote in. I really appreciate the back-and-forth. Several animators pointed out that the old-style sneering, dog-kicking villain is often found in video games. That is true, but games are a different kind of deal. In a movie, the audience just watches the villain. A game player may be trying to actually kill him! This is the big reason why so many game villains are aliens rather than humans. A player can kill a creature without any guilt Actual real-life soldiers are conditioned to objectify their battlefield enemy rather than view him as a fellow human being who is probably somebody’s son or brother. If a soldier starts empathizing with his enemy, he must be pulled off the front line before he gets himself and his fellow soldiers shot.
However, I believe there is a market for games that feature more nuanced villains. They probably will not be first-person shooters though.
HERE IS SOME REALLY NICE FLASH WORK
Adam Phillips continues to impress with his Flash stories about Bitey.
Here is a new one. “I used Flash CS3, the .fla is over 300MB (half of that is audio) and it took me four weeks,” he explains.
MOTION CAPTURE SOCIETY HAS A NEW WEBSITE
The indefatigable Demian Gordon, chairman of the Motion Capture Society, wants everybody to know that MCS has moved into a brand new site, and it is updated daily. I checked it out (see links below), and those guys deserve an animated round of applause and a couple of knuckle taps.
Society press page – all the mocap news that’s fit to print:
Green light hell – announced movies that will most likely feature some motion capture:
Jobs – nuff said:
And don’t miss the new longer trailer for Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” on the press page. Wow!
ACTING FOR ANIMATORS WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
CRAFT NOTES
“How do you know when reference acting is good?”
You have a sequence to animate, and so you videotape yourself acting it out. Then you use that recording as a visual reference. But how do you know whether the performance you gave on camera is good or not? If the performance is weak, then the movement and gestures cannot be trusted for reference.
Remember the Chicago-based animation studio named Big Idea? They did the Veggie Tales cartoons for kids. I taught there once and learned that each of their animators had an “animation buddy”, and the two of them would take turns doing reference for one another. That was probably a good idea they had at Big Idea. <g> Here’s why: When you do your own video reference, it is almost guaranteed that you will be aware of your own performance while you are doing it in front of the camera. That is because you are not a stage actor. You are an animator, and animators are obsessive about movement. Stage actors learn not to think about movement at all, especially when they are performing. If you think about how you are moving, then you can’t pursue an acting objective. Acting is doing. And if you are thinking about your movement, then that is what you are doing. You are not acting. You are saying to yourself, in effect, “I am not really acting but, if I was, it would look like this.” Frankly, a person can go insane from doing that for too long. I have seen newcomers to my stage acting workshops literally be unable to walk across the stage without thinking about walking. You don’t say, “Lessee, how does walking go…?” What you do is cross the room to pick up the water glass. If you think about the movement of your walking while you walk, you will feel awkward and clumsy and self-conscious.
Fortunately for animators, most sequences are extremely short, just a very few seconds. The shorter the sequence, the more likely you can trust your performance on camera. But even for a short sequence, the goal is to make the performance as simple and straightforward as possible. If, for instance, you have a sequence in which a character answers a telephone on a desk, you would give yourself something to be doing before the telephone rings. The telephone interrupts whatever it is you are doing. And be specific about who is on the other end of the telephone call. Are you expecting a call from a specific person? Is that the person on the phone, or is it somebody else? And on and on and on…. The more circumstances you can specify, the better it will be. A good definition of stage acting is this: “Acting is behaving believably in pretend circumstances for a theatrical purpose.”
Which brings me back to the idea of an “animation buddy". The really good thing about having someone else do your reference for you is that he or she is not going to be animating it. Because he isn’t going to animate it, he is not as likely to be thinking about his movements.
One more thing – about the use of mirrors. A mirror is good for capturing a pose or a facial expression, but it is not going to be very good for an entire sequence. The reason is that when you act in front of a mirror, you are trying to be both actor and audience at the same time, which means that you are doing neither fully.
I suppose the bottom line is that nuanced character animation is difficult. That is why you get the big bucks. Heh. <g>
Happy Holidays. See you in 2010!
