Body Acting

Body acting has been both an incredibly fun and simultaneously frustrating endeavour. Starting the project before Christmas, I was really looking forward to working on a full body animation that focussed heavily on performance, particularly one based on a specific character.

I chose Aron’s character, the mercenary turned gardener as I was immediately able to get a sense of how this character might move and then how to break expectations to make a light hearted and funny animation. In the one session before Christmas, I spent the afternoon simply learning about the character, how to draw him, the different elements of his design and exploring how he might move. After the first session I had a good overall concept of the design and had key frames I was ready to work on after the break.

Initial Key Frames – Dec 2023

After Christmas break, I came back into Body Acting with gusto, I was excited to work on the exercise and jumped straight into breakdowns and in-betweening. I found that this excitement was quite quickly dampened. Even though I had a clear idea of what I wanted, a video reference and a good understanding of the character design, I found it incredibly difficult to make him move in a way that didn’t feel stilted and forced. Lots of my early versions of the work feel very segmented and don’t flow well in terms of the full body motion.

Early version of Body Acting exercise
Videa reference 1.1
Video reference 1.2

After talking things through with Christina and Ko, I found that I was focussing too hard on trying to incorporate design instead of the movement and acting. I was so focussed on the character being “right” that it was never going to be. So with Christina’s guidance I decided to strip the design back to its very basic shapes, working from the same key frame ideas.

Second iteration of Body Acting exercise

In this version, I stripped the design right back and tried my best to work in simple shapes, so that I wouldn’t be restricted by what I thought I should be doing. However I think that at this stage, I had been working at it for so long that I just felt blocked by the movement and that I couldn’t figure out how to make the movement feel possible let alone natural. So I sucked it up and decided to begin again. I went back and redrew my thumbnails, I redid my keys and my references and I started again.

Thumbnails V2

This time I simplified the movement, I stripped the design back completely and I reformatted how I thought about breaking down the animation sequences. I realised that in the original sequence I wasn’t correctly breaking down the movement and really focussed on timing out the sequences, finding the balance and weight in the movement and working on efficient and effective movement.

Live reference 1
Video Reference 2.1
Final version of Body Acting

This time I was far more successful in the exercise, I was able to understand the movement and execute them effectively, I was able to work actively with my references videos and I was able to exaggerate performance without relying on smear frames as a crutch. In hindsight i’m very glad I took the time to start this exercise over, it was a very useful lesson in not being precious about work and understanding when best to reframe your work both practically and mentally.

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