This scene was a two week exercise from the acting module. Acting as in “pantomime” that is, with no dialogue. We were asked to come up with a story, anything would go. I thought of this triangle player going to work. Once we had the story, our teacher Erik added the “magic if”: what if a safe fell from above? The task was then to find out how the character would react to this given circumstance.

In order to know what the reaction would be, you had to get to know your character. Who is he? What is his job? Where is he? How old is he? Does he have a family? What was his childhood like? What’s his favorite song? etc. My character is a professional musician, somewhere in his mid thirties, living in London. He’s an uptight person who never shows much emotion, except when he plays his triangle, which is his dearest posession. Everyday he travels by the tube to his job in the London Symphony Orchestra. One day while stepping off the train, a safe falls down on a fellow commuting person…

Working two weeks on a scene you start to really go into detail. This playblast is just work in progress really. I will probably tweak some stuff before considering it done. I fiddled around a lot with the timing of the different poses and actions, scooping stuff back and forth. Can’t decide if I’m happy with the current timing or not. What you don’t want is even timing, but you do want pace and variation.

One of the last things I started to look at was moving holds. Nothing is ever 100% still in 3D animation, and you have to come up with “noise” to make the character seem alive even when he’s not doing anything. I found that really hard. If you don’t do it, the character looks dead. If you do it, he easily looks nervous. Whatever you do you have to play it subtle. In some 2D styles perfect holds isn’t a problem, in others you can get away with noise consisting of three or four drawings of the same pose looping. 3D is different. It tends to be more naturalistic, even when it’s stylized and cartoony. 3D is also endless tweaking.