In the beginning, I personally felt like the acting classes are not for me as I felt very embarrassed and shy during them. I didn’t understand the purpose of those exercises. However, with time I actually started to enjoy them and the acting activities made more sense for me. Learning how the body moves and practising it myself was very helpful for my animation work. I realised that acting things out and observing the movement of the body in real life is crucial when it comes to animating characters later and making them look “alive”. What’s more, it was interesting learning performance theories and applying them in the physical world.
Some of the things we looked into were:
I have noticed that my 3D animation work benefits greatly from the acting classes. As rigging is like puppetry, it really helps when you know how the body moves in different situations and how to express your ideas through the movement of the character. I have been practising how to animate characters interacting with each other in 3D. That includes: looking into the body language, and emotions, and also introducing LipSync.
Also, I have a great interest in working with Maya and would like to pursue the 3D pathway of animation. It’s such a broad software and it seems like you can do everything in it, but also, you can never know everything about it. So far I feel confident in what I’ve learned with the great help of Kevin and some online tutorials, and I will keep trying to become better at using Maya. My goal is to make my own character and rig it myself, but for now, I’ll stick with Binky and Bonky.