Character Performance

Term Three Year 1- Character Performance

This terms unit is on Character performance, basing an animation on a piece of speech of our choice. There are many different sources that can be looked at, such as film, audio books and television. Its been hard to find something that is interesting both as a audio piece, as well as an animated piece. Also the problem with extracting a piece of audio from a whole track is that the audio can seem out of context, unless it is the beginning or the end of a track. The audience that will watch the animation might not understand the audio if its just taken out without thinking of the context of the piece, whether or not it can be understood on its own or not.

I looked at animated films first of all, as the audio is written with animated characters in mind. The problem with taking the audio from this type of film is that it was written with a specific piece of animation in mind. This can be a pro or a con when it comes to animating my own piece for the audio, depending on whether the piece stands on its own or not will also be a large factor.

Looking at live action films make it easier as you can see how an actor/actress is performing at the point the audio is playing. This will give me a better insight into how my character could be animated and will help to see what emotions are being played out on screen. The good thing about choosing a live action film is that there is already reference to work from, without having to film extra references to animate from. Though creating your own reference will aid in in the animation process, especially in facial animation.

Audio books are a great reference for audio for the project as there are many different books to choose from, but there is not visual reference to go by, also there is normally just one person reading that narrative, as well as all the different characters. There are pros and cons to this for animation, one pro is that as there is no visuals with the audio this allows for more creative thinking for that animation. A con to this is that because normally there is only one person reading the book, there is not that much of a range of voices to work with. This can make it hard to animated to as the intention for the audio for it only to be listen to, rather then have visuals placed beside it.