To do the body-acting task, I decided to start by looking into body mechanics theories and researching how to incorporate good character acting and create a personality for the character.
The traits of a character is what defines its behaviour. The way a character walks, reacts to situations, communicates or does tasks is all influenced by the character’s personality and environment.
In my case, I have selected to work with John’s character – Kenneth.
This character will be opening a pickle jar. After doing some acting for this myself I’ve been let to the conclusion that this particular character’s movement should be rapid and stiff at the same time. Also, as of his age, he should have limited movement capabilities and should demonstrate the aches that come from his age during any activity he’s doing. What’s more, because of the physical restrictions of his age he compensates with the strength of determination, which might result in overdoing the act.
- The Act – struggling to open a pickle jar; fidgeting with the jar for a while; getting back aches and running out of breath from old age from putting too much effort into trying to open the jar; not giving up and putting all his strength in attempts to open the jar with his teeth; overdoing it and spilling the jar on the floor; being lost…
I also practised this task in 3D and created a dancing scene Act: For this, I used a character which I modeled myself and rigged myself. I also did a LinkedIn Learning Course on Character Rigging.
For this exercise, I am confident that I can create a much better animation in 3D, however, I wanted to experiment and stick to my 2D version. My 2D version is not a rig. I just like working with solid shapes/colours. Also, I am focusing on the timing and keys instead of. adding in-betweens for smoothening out the animation.
This is probably the exercise that I struggled the most with. I think my initial approach to the task was completely wrong and then I wasn’t fully able to fix it properly. It felt like the more time I spend on it the worse it was getting. Eventually, I was able to get it to a stage where it was far from perfect but at least it conveyed my idea for the Act, which was: an old man having trouble opening a jar.