Dialogue Piece

Excerpt from brief: Using a piece of dialogue, animate to the dialogue, delivering a great performance. Make the feelings, mood and personality of the character stand out. This was one of the first videos that we were shown for research on this exercise:

Long Ago and Far Away- The Reluctant Dragon

In this clip, we can see the animators taking elements from theatrical reality acting techniques. There are no facial animations or lip syncing on the human characters, thus the animators had to heavily rely on the gesticulation of the armatures they were using. This is an interesting way to save time and really rely upon body language to convey a charcater's mood. Where the gesticulation of hand movements is concerned, I am definitely going to try and emulate it within my own work. However, I am also planning to involve facial expressions in my character because I already have a design that utilises them within my exercise performances. Ideally, I would love to also include lip sync, as this is a skill I have been able to demonstrate within my Creative Collaboration module. This will be a feature that is decided at a later time, when I can assess if I have enough time to include such things. The idea for this part of the brief was taken from the '11 Seconds Club'

This is an example of one of their briefs:

The audio that we were 4 audio clips, taken from past 11 second club competitions.

This was the audio clip that I selected out of the possible 4:

I transcribed the audio on a sheet of A4 with bold letters, to act as a make-shift autocue for my reference footage.

Taking into consideration, once again, the character bio of my protagonistic character: Ardal Amundsen, (which can be seen below), I drew up a storyboard for my dialogue piece. " Name Ardal Jambon Amundsen Gender Male Age 10-11 Ethnicity White Family Mother-Niamh, Father-Einar, Sister-Caoimhe (Kee-va), Nan-Tilly Cultural Background Irish/Scot Celtic and Norwegian Intelligence Lacking Occupation Student Religion Catholic Sexual Orientation Straight though he doesn't understand what that really means Secrets Hates most typical child activities finds far more solace in tidying his room to the musical stylings of Nina Simone Fears/Phobias Mess, Button-up shirts (hates the touching the buttons), the Dark, Most stories about Hell he's been told by his grandmother, school bullies, neighbourhood bullies, teachers and teaching staff bullies, family bullies, a blocking off his mother and has a general social disposition combined with some PTSD-like childhood anxiety. Fave Music Rock (he says) Nina Simone, The Supremes, Aretha Franklin Sense of Humour Fine to have a laugh at anything but is 99% the butt of his friends and family's jokes. Sarcasm and most forms of wit are usually lost on him Adrenaline Moments Beating the record for time taken to clean his room, Getting to school on time unscathed by bullies, any time he is not being humiliated by either himself or peers Physical Description Lanky and tall for his age Physical Disabilities Has some sort of Calamity James magnetism towards accidents and humiliations. Generally quite weak. Has Dyspraxia Character Bio: Ardal Jambon Amundsen is a 10-going on-11 year old boy who attends St Holy Mother All Saints All Virgins Roman Catholic Primary School SHMASAV RCP (sh-mah-ss-av arr-see-pee). He lives within walking distance to the school, with his Mother: Niamh Amundsen (who is of Irish decent), his Father: Einar Amundsen (who is of Scottish and Norwegian decent), his older sister: Caoimhe (who must be of Hellish decent) and his Nan: Tilly (who is probably on a decent into madness). He may be raised catholic but his grades are unholy, as he is at the bottom of his class, as well as the social hierarchy with teachers, students and caretakers alike all unifying together in their combined ill-opinion of Ardal. This might be because of how pathetic he can truly be at times, at least in there eyes, as he's always either humiliating or hurting himself in attempts to go about his daily life. The only sanctuary in Ardal's life away from his angry, work-tired, nurse of a mother, his high-functioning alcoholic of a father, his b*tch of a sister and his senile wreck of a grandmother, is in his bedroom. Where he can secretly listen to the soul queens of yesteryear, like Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin in peace, whilst he takes joy in organising his shoes by colour, (in correspondence to the rainbow colours upon 'Dark Side Of The Moon'-Pink Floyd album Ardal's Dad gave him when he lied about "loving" Rock music).

Because of his unnaturally tall height and magnetism for trouble, whether Ardal likes it or not he will always stand out from the crowd to be judged. So will he ever actually ever overcome his turmoil-prone ways?

Will years of suppressing all of his anxieties that he's really too young and thick to understand ever emerge? If so, as a violent animal? or neutered House Pet?

Will he learn that perhaps he can finally get people to like him? or perhaps even learn that for that to happen he has to like himself?

Most likely he's just gonna cost for a while and keep getting into very humorous situations... at least for us. " I decided to opt. for a mid shot, so that I could mainly focus on the gesticulation of the words, and not have to preoccupy myself with foot placement. For this piece of audio, I didn't envision the placing of his feet to be anything of significance and I wanted the views attention to maintain and be focussed on his top-half.

This is the reference I managed to film:

I was happy with how much my acting managed to match up with the audio clip eventually. This was initially hard to nail down correctly. I also tried to keep the movements short and concise, you can see that with the first few takes of the reference footage, I was too loose and not creating good silhouettes for me to work off when translating my observations into a bar sheet. With my final take I ended up with this bar sheet, which I felt happy with as the timespan of the movements were more calculated and refined, (In a way that did not detract anything from the acting, rather a more refined performance for a theatrical reality):

Once I was ready to animate I had to make a new rig for the performance. This was because The reference footage was mainly a front elevation. Now that I was more used to rigging, though, I found that this process, although time-consuming was relatively easy.

I used the image of all the elevations of my turnaround to create a front elevation rig. I feel now that I am really starting to appreciate all of the long processes that are involved at the start of each exercise/ module for one character. Now that I already had a sheet of possible elevations for my character design, it was easy to create many different rigs with this image being used as a traceable reference.

The next part of this rig was drawing a bunch of mainly neutral mouth shapes, I used this sheet as a guide:

Which, in turn was an updated-for-stylistic-choices remake of this character construction sheet from my Creative Collaboration module:

These mouth were tased around as separate frames within ToonBoom and went into a drawing substation box for me to use later on in the animation process.

Before actually animating I think that it is important to highlight in this stage of reflection that I found my bar sheets were more interpretive in their depiction and that this was deliberately done by myself, when I was drawing them out. I think that i want to improve upon and tweak the actual movements (amount of frames) in the actual animation process, as the reference footage is giving me an idea of what I want, rather than how I am going to finally execute, sometimes that cannot be planned. This is similar to what happened in my 'Heartbroken Lover' exercise, however in that case the final product really diverged from the reference due to technical problems. At first, I started placing keyframes in the drawing layer of my rigs components.

Then I realised that if I decided to give peg layers to every drawing layer and place the keyframes on the pegs instead I would make my process a lot easier. This is because I had done the same practice in my creative collaboration project using bone layers.

From what I understand this is better than animating in the drawing layer because it can lead to messy complications if I want to go back and edit tweens/substitutions later on in the process. Plus, I also know that I have made drawing substitutions for drawings like the ones in the arm layer. This should hopefully avoid ugly clipping visuals, when manipulating the rig beyond it's intended drawings zone. I have had issues with the pivotal points changing on the drawing substitutions. This has gotten very frustrating so rather than wasting anymore time not being able to work out this problem, I have decided to move onto another aspect of the animation. I shall go back with a clearer head for the pivot problem, later on in the process. I opted to instead tackle the lip syncing process, this was a great way of getting to practice my lip sync skills again in ToonBoom. I find this a satisfying process.

*NOTE* For some glitchy reason, the videos that I exported whilst going through my various stages of animation have un-synced the audio and visuals, so that the lip sync and gestures appear to be a couple of frames out of time. This is the fault of the video compression or some other unknown glitch. I got the audio fixed for the final submission in Adobe Premiere. As for the other videos I didn't want to have to slice up the audio for every stage, so unfortunately they shall remain slightly un-synced. Once the lip-syncing was complete I was back onto more of the body movements. I keyed out some of the poses, mainly for the torso and head, so that the arms might follow later on. This worked for the most part and I was quite satisfied with the way my arms gesticulated. However I was struggling to copy my reference exactly because of some of the limitations on the rig. The pivotal problem I had before was still not really solved so I've just had to work with the one elevation, I have available to me in this particular rig. I have learned that you cannot add more drawing substitutions, post rigging process. This did prove to be time-effective, though. At one stage I did find myself struggling to return back to the position of my reference footage because I had to diverge from it with previous movements. When I could use the reference footage again I had to be mindful of improvising a pose that would take me back into the reference silhouette from the improvised one. That was a rookie error. (these images display the divergence):

I did find my way around this problem by ignoring where my arm placements were in the reference footage when the character was in a resting position, this avoided my rigs arms moving naturally during one of the pauses. I synced the arms back with the ref footage during the next display of motion. I have learned the importance of checking footage and keeping with it, rather than diverging. In this case it couldn't be avoided once I had finished rigging and started animating. Therefore I am glad that I could improvise with a bit of ingenuity in this particular problem. One of the main aspects of this module, I think, is to become a more practiced problem-solver. On certain arm movements, I spaced out the timings of when the motion would start on either appendage, by 1 or 2 frames. This avoided twinning on motions such as the hugging of the characters shoulders.

I tried to capture certain subtleties in the dialogue, such as the sniffing and breathing that can be heard on the audio clip. I feel that all these minor details provided themselves to the performance by perhaps showing more depth of character. With all of the body movements complete, it was in this time, I had to focus on the facial expressions of the character. I found expression mainly came through the eyes and brows of of my character, as well as where the eyes gazed on screen. Although this module focusses on conveying the main performance through body language, I found that the more nuanced interpretations to be found in the eyes, (almost exclusively). This reminded me of the The Boy With Tape On His Face performance, researched at the start of the module:

I discovered I could find a secondary and more subtle performance in details like from where the eyes looked, to where the brows shifted. An example of this is found on words like "girl", in this audio clip. I found myself, (much like a cliché actor), asking: what is motivating my character around the word, "girl"? Who are the other people he is referring to? and how are they related to him? what does he think of them?

Ardal's bio displays him to have an awkward disposition and not many friends. He does long for friends and to be liked, which is why this audio fits him perfectly. I tried to stay true to his character by having him glance away from the camera when he quickly ponders at the thought of a change happening for him in relation to these two off-camera counterparts. On the other hand, to avoid him looking too shifty with his eyes never meeting in front of him, I tried to convey him for the honest and good-natured boy he is, with him, for the most part, talking to the audience. I realise that this is an unorthodox break of the fourth wall, but I feel I needed the character to talk to me, so I could get the most understanding for myself out of this exercise, it was almost like manufacturing a counterpart who is trying to interact with you. I had to see if i believed it for myself. I have learned a lot about the value of eyes in performance from this activity. I can only hope my intentions have actually worked upon review from my tutors/peers. This is the final (fixed audio) version of my dialogue piece exercise: