Acting for Animation
Today we began our new subject focusing on the “drama” part of the Drawing Drama and Design unit.
The aim of this lesson being to understand and explore how a picture tells a story. As animators this is obviously very important because all of our pictures must tell a story, we need to learn how to communicate meaning effectively.
We began with some warm-up exercises which led to us saying some facts about ourselves – our teacher made us aware that we were telling stories already, our stories.
We played a game of charades where our physicality had to communicate what animated film we were describing, then expanded on this by creating a tableau (still image / scene using ourselves), first describing a popular animated film, E.G; Snow White or Cinderella. This became more complex when we had to depict moments in history like Nelson being wounded in the battle of Trafalgar or the French Revolution. This was frustrating as we only had 10 seconds to do it and couldn’t communicate to organise ourselves because it would give away what the content was. (the other groups were supposed to be guessing what we were showing)
However, for our final task we were split in to groups and had to create a scene, with each character entering one at a time, until the final tableau is formed. My group’s scene was a footballer having just scored the winning goal in a penalty shoot out. This meant the key characters were; The Striker, Goal-Keeper, team members and a Referee. One team would have just lost, so would be mortified, the other team would be jubilant. The goal keeper would be furious with himself and the referee had to be unbiased.
Using the concept of levels to signify status in the tableau, the losing team and the goal keeper were lower down and miserable in their defeat. We used curled up physicality, with heads down, not looking at the camera. The Winning team were upstanding with clear open facial expressions and physicality – arms in the air, clearly celebrating. The referee then was upright but in a neutral pose while blowing the whistle, making it clear this is a game and it’s just ended and he’s an impartial force.
We were told we could improve by having the losing team’s faces more visible so we can see the miserable faces. but apart from that i personally felt quite pleased with the clarity of the scene and the framing and depth, with our goal keeper in the foreground and the teams further back, with the goalkeeper in the middleground.
dddmiriamfox 