AM - Class 4 / Week 1 - Lecture

Acting 101.

Most of the time when your working hard on your shot to make it look good, you kind of lose track of the overall picture, and 

what the main focus of your shot is. The main focus of any animated acting shot is: Clarity, Honesty, Sincerity, & Simplicity , And one of the most important thing to keep in mind is that the audience watching your shot are waiting to be entertained, 

so its your job is to make sure NOT to let them down.

When you're trying to implement a certain acting gesture into a shot, you have to make sure that its clear enough and understandable by the audience & not just to you, look for a universal appeal that is clear to everybody, so its always good 

to ask around and show your progress to others to know if the shot is communicating well.

Before you start working on a shot its very important to understand the context, and where the shot is going to fall in production, what happened before, what will happen after, and what your character is thinking at that same exact moment.  Once you understand all that you can move on for staging your shot.

Certain staging requires different settings for animation. For instance, animating a long shot requires Broad Big character performance in order for it to read well from far perspective,  as for animating a close up shot you'll need to spend much of your time tweaking the lips & cheeks and finessing all the little details in the face, as for a medium shot with multiple characters, you'll need to choreograph your motion to grab the attention of the viewer to the right character in the right time.

If you want the audience to look at something on screen It Has To Move, then they look at it, and they'll keep looking at it until something else moves.. and so on, so you have to make sure that the important stuff are happening in obvious movement, and the rest is passive, Not Static, but moving without distracting the main motion.

if you have a dialog shot to animate, you'll have to keep looping it over & over again until it gets stuck in your brain, to the extend that you could memorize all the little things between the words like the little breath,spits, and gargles, its all these 

little stuff to animate that will make the shot very character rich.   

Then start looking for the key phrases to animate, & always keep in mind that you are Animating the thoughts behind the words, not just the words!

Its highly un-recommended to directly sit on your computer and start animating without planing, because you'll end up with 

a week shot with a week performance, you'll need to shoot references, thumbnail planing, then you can start animating.

Quick notes:

- Make proper, clear acting choices & avoiding Cliché will make your shot stand out and unique.

- Eye darts (on 2 frames) keeps the character alive.

- Keep the eye, lids, & brows all connected to each other.

- Hands are very expressive, so use there appealing posing to the maximum.