Ideas!

I’m kinda glad that my creative juices are flowing this week. A more solid idea for my demo real seems to be taking shape. Somehow though, I feel that it lacks the extra finesse that could make or break my reel. There’s still enough time for me to come up with new ideas and tweak my current one. I’m pretty confident that by the time we have to draft up our storyboards, I can gather enough advice and feedback from my instructors and classmates to come up with something tangible.

Over the week, I was actually able to catch the CG animated film, Horton Hears A Who. Some of the technical aspects seemed to meet my expectations, yet somehow there were a few aspects that just didn’t flow well with me.

The things that I liked about the film, were art direction, character design, the character models, textures, and environment designs. The things that compelled me to watch the film were, the animation and story. In these areas, I was a little disappointed.

From what I saw in the trailers, I thought that the animation was pretty good. However, I guess because the trailers contained such short segments, there wasn’t enough information to depict how they were directing the animation. The character development and dialog seemed to limit the main character to a certain style of animation. I felt that the posing was well done. However, I felt that the animation was too frantic and over-acted.

I suppose though, with the main character being played by Jim Carrey, the animators felt that they had to match the actor’s personality to the animation. There are probably a lot people who agree that Jim Carrey is tends to be someone who over-emphasizes his characters.

As I go through the course, I guess I have to find the line between exaggeration and subtle nuances to portray my characters’ “acting” in my animation. Examples of animation that seem to balance animation technique quite well, are sequences that you can find in most Pixar films.

Until it was pointed out to me, I didn’t know how much a subtle action can do for a scene. You always hear about animation needing exaggeration, but I guess it depends on the emotional content of the sequence you’re watching.

I’m pretty confident in where my reference research is taking me, but being able to apply all the knowledge that I’ve acquired so far is going to be pretty crucial.