Part1 Audio Options
Acting! It’s one of the most important components of being a successful animator. This week we were given the task of selecting three conversations and editing audio for future animation. We have to choose an audio clip that contains the interaction between the two characters. In the middle of the period, one person has to speak for 10-20s.
I chose three pieces of audio. They have one thing in common, that is, they have obvious emotional expression, and they can also create freely with appropriate body language.
- The first section is a dialogue between the man and the woman. The man excitedly expresses that he is suitable for rock music, and the rising tone represents his determination.
- The second paragraph is a dispute between the two protagonists. They both speak fast to express their strength, until at last there is a physical conflict between them.
- The third paragraph is a couple quarrel, there are some emotional expression and pause.
Part2 Action Recording
Process Steps
1 . Role building
Before shooting a video, we need to shape the character well, one is based on the sound of the audio, the other is to shape the character without any material. But no matter which one, the role should include his personality, age, gender, hobbies, advantages, disadvantages and even life experience. In a word, the richer the better. The purpose of this is to endow the character with soul and thought as well as rich emotion. When we walk into the character, we can imagine what kind of posture and expression he will put on. We have a starting point and we know where to start.
2 . Conceive a story
Every animation demo we do exists in a complete story. Even if it’s a very short audio, we can also conceive a small story for him. The reason why we want to conceive a story is that the story can tell us what kind of person he is, what happened in what place, and what he is thinking at this moment. When we understand these, we will have a clear idea. Avoid the impact of being confused or having too many ideas when doing animation. In addition, we can write the emotions and actions of the characters in the process of writing stories.
3 . Take a reference video
After designing the story, we can take our video reference according to the plot. This is a very important link. The better the performance, the clearer our animation feeling, which can save us a lot of unnecessary trouble.
4 . Know your audio
This seems obvious, but it’s easy to settle for knowing your audio “pretty well.” Don’t settle! Know our audio like the back of our hand and internalize it. Listen to it on a loop, until the cadence is familiar to you. We should be able to recite it accurately, with every pause and emphasis in the right place. We don’t want our video reference to show us trying to remember the words or throwing in gestures too early or too late. While shooting reference, our focus should be on what our character is feeling and doing, not what word comes next and when.
5 . Speak, don’t mouth
We want our reference performance to be as genuine as possible. Performing the dialogue audibly can help us better connect to the words. Speaking the words will also help us to see where our character should take breaths, even if we can’t hear their breathing in the audio track.
Bonus: Since we’re speaking along with our audio track, it can let us know when your timing is off and if we need to study the track more.
6 . Consider the energy level
Different voice performances call for different energy levels. We probably don’t want to be gesturing wildly during a subdued line read, and we don’t want to underact when the character’s voice is full of energy.
If our character is speaking calmly, speak calmly. If they’re yelling, yell! We want the effort of a high-energy line read to show up in our video reference.
https://www.animationmentor.com/blog/how-to-make-an-awesome-video-reference
Feedback of the audio
‘Audio clip 2 I think is the best one of these Crystal. Lots of different ways you can approach the story with this clip and it also opens it up to turning this in to a comedy if you want.’
I got Luke’s feedback, so I chose Audio 2. In this original movie, the two characters don’t have much body movement, but their expressions are in place.
Reference Recording
My idea is to add more body movements to enrich the dialogue. My thoughts include the following：
- Two characters are standing, character a starts to talk with his hands crossed, and then he wants to go. Character B grabs him and is thrown away by character A.
- Character B strides forward to character a, puts his finger against his chest and starts questioning, pushing him all the way to the wall.
- Character a begins to ask character B to step back.
- Character B’s mood begins to collapse, retreats and insults character a, along with the sentence ‘you do nothing’ with some actions, and points to character a with a finger and says ‘you never loved her’. In this process, character B has a large range of actions, including the responsibility of akimbo.
In the end, I chose to shoot and play the audio at the same time, and then synthesize the video and audio at the later stage. I know the lines clearly, which will help me perform better, and also enable me to better track the audio and understand the emotions of the characters.
The action reference:
Part3 Feedback
Ftrack feedback 1:
Ftrack feedback 2 ( performance) :
Notes of the advices from Luke
01s: Remove the action that the arms crossed since it is always seen as a bit of a cheat. So put his arms behind his back, or put them on his hips there. Or a bit more exaggerated with it so try and make it a little bit light hearted.
05s: If you see in your reference they’re very close together it makes it much easier to keep the heat in the argument. Rather than it being a manager’s to get that far away. Just have a go.
07s: You would get the pose in it in the back, so like really push that back out there so like he’s probably puffing out his chest.
13s: Then slowly, slowly start to set back doesn’t even have to walk away. You just have to slowly start to retreat in himself.
15s: Then when you go step away, grabs him like that, and then talk to him like this as if it is because it’s a side on one
Then I found some quarrel film performance.
Conclusion
I should always pay attention to the bending of the spine, which may give people the feeling of grievance or pride. When a person is strong, he must be responsible for others.
Considering the position of the hands and the placement of the arms for emotional expression, the crossing of the hands makes people feel deceptive. On the contrary, the two hands are placed on the hips or on the waist, which is more like swearing sovereignty.
The distance between two people also represents emotion. If two people are far away, it’s hard to feel that they are about to have a fierce quarrel. On the contrary, the closer they are, the more oppressive they feel.
Use the fingers to point to another character more often, but be firm.
I feel that I have learned some new skills of body language expression, including gesture, body shape, expression of eyes and position relationship between characters. This week I’ll summarize Luke’s comments and some references I’ve found for re recording.