This week i thought it would be nice to delve a little into how to make your acting clips more believable. An important aspect of this i believe, is setting the background and/or backstory of your characters. How the audience percieve your animation as believable or not is mainly based upon whether or not they empathize with it. It may be something that happened to them that was similar or to someone they know, that makes it real. Or that the scene brings out certain familiar emotions that people can relate to.
So here's just a little bit from something i've learnt of an easy way to setup your character for your acting shot.
AGE: How old is your character? This will have an impact on how he/she behaves.
Ethncity: Asian? Coacation? African? etc... Cultural variations
Occupation: Defines outlook of life? Stress levels.
Core personality traits: Timid, Bold, Crafty, Selfish, Helpful etc...
Next comes the context of your shot
Where does your scene take place?
When?
What did your character do before entering the scene?
What is the long term goal of the character?
What is the character's wish? What is his scene specific goal that brings him closer to achieving his long term goals?
The Conflict: What does he have to overcome to achieve that goal?
Actions: Actions taken that describe the shot.
These are just a few examples on how you can break down the planning stage of your shot to help things along.
hmm, pretty useful infor to help planning~ thks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty true that we should think of a backstory for your character. Without the backstory, the audience wouldn't remember or feel for the character.
ReplyDeleteLike example, for my current group project, our initial story idea was 3 little bots that go around helping human beings. We, human, don't know the existence of them. It could be an interesting piece of animation, but the audiences would most likely ask themselves why would the bots help human being. This result in weak story for your character.
We thought of this problem and changed the story to "evil electronic coperation" sends their bots to destroy competitors' products or damage their expired warranty devices so that consumers have to buy a new device from them. This give the character a strong reason for them to exist and audiences can easily relate to them.
So always remember to have a strong backstoy for your characters and a reason for them to do or perform certain act.