We’ve been introduced to various acting workshop throughout majority of term 1 and some in term 2.
I have had them before in a slightly different form during my BA, so I think I was able to progressively take myself less serious in doing some of the exercises without feeling silly or judged. I think this time though, I started to see how those teaching could be applied to my practise, especially once the animation exercises became more acting reliant.
I’m still quite shy performing in front of a group but as the sessions progressed I was more eager to just try whatever I was asked to do. We all communicate with our bodies, some more than others, and we think that we can read another person’s feeling and emotions through their body language but I think that we’ve become so reliant on speech that sometimes we forget to look past someone’s eyes or lips.
As an animator though, the bare body language sometimes is not enough. We think we know how to convey a certain emotion on a character of our choice, but it’s not always read correctly by the audience. Here’s where exaggeration comes to our aid. By making an emotion two or three times bigger makes the audience instantly understanding what is going on in a certain scene. Subtlety has of course its purpose once strategically placed along with exaggeration as it can clearly identify one character from another.
I now got more used to film myself for references (even though I still prefer to do it away from other people), then sketch thumbnails and make the acting bigger. I’ve also noticed I’m starting to look more at the performance of characters from the film that I watch, and the same goes for pieces of animation I find online from animators I follow.