Linear Stage

After blocking out the animation, I showed it to a few people to get some feedback. My tutor suggested that I could lose the part where he picks up the sandwich because it is quite obvious what it is from the way that he is holding it. Another suggestion was that the camera could be a bit closer to the character so that the facial expressions were focused on more. Here is the result of trying out these suggestions:




I think this works better than before because it fits in the time a lot better with losing the first section. However, I feel that it is not clear that he eats the fly at the end and this was confirmed when I showed it to the group because everyone said that I needed something to let the audience know what was happening. They also said that, now that I don't have him picking up the sandwich, I need something at the start as well so that we know it is something that he is going to eat.

At this point I switched to using linear curves so that I got a feel for how the timing of all the moves was working. I also added in extra animation to make it more obvious what is going on. This is shown in the movie below:



As you can see, I've added in a couple of little bits. The main change is where he licks his lips at the beginning. I think that this addition leaves us in no doubt that he intends to eat something. I'm pleased with that because that is the whole point of mime, to make it really obvious to the audience what the character is doing by performing an action.

However, I still need to add something at the end of the piece to show that he has eaten the fly. The obvious gesture would be showing that it doesn't taste very nice. I tried this out and this is shown in the video below:



I think the part added to the end works really well. Again, it has been made really obvious that he has swallowed something and that it didn't taste nice. This, along with the gestures that suggest a fly has landed on his sandwich, indicate that he has eaten the fly. I have also added some extra inbetweens so that the movement flows better. I think the movements also have a lot more anticipation now although the part where he shrugs his shoulders needs more anticipation, it happens far too fast.

Blocking

From the recordings that I gathered for reference footage I have been blocking out the scene using the timing in the animatic. The video below shows the first stage of blocking:



I am fairly happy with most of the poses in the scene. I think that it will make a really good mime piece because most of the performance will be in the characters facial expression. I showed the movie to my tutor and the feedback was very useful. One of the suggestions was to have the camera closer in so that we can concentrate on the face. It was also suggested that the sandwich could get closer to his mouth each time which would build up the anticipation and also that I could replace the hand gesture with something more subtle.

I have had a go at making these changes and also added in some facial expression so that you can see exactly what his mood is at all times. The movie below shows these changes:

Reference

I have been looking at some "how to" videos on mime on the "ehow" website to see what kind of things I need to remember when animating my character. The two main things that show what is going on in a mime scene are the characters facial expressions and hand gestures. The two videos below show some basic mime facial expressions and also how a mime artists hads should move when picking something up:

Mime Facial Expressions -- powered by eHow.com

Mime Hand Techniques -- powered by eHow.com

As you can see, the facial expressions in mime are very exaggerated. This is so that the audience has no doubt what the character is feeling at that particular moment. This is something that I will need to take in to consideration for my piece because I need to let the audience know that he is happy to have his sandwich and also that he is angry at the fly for landing on it.

The hand technique that he shows us in the second video will also be very useful in my scene as the actual sandwich will not be visible to the audience. This technique allows the mime artist to form the shape of an invisible object and also establish that he has a grip on it.

The last mime technique that I will use for my scene is the use of the eyes. This will be very important for showing the audience that there is a fly buzzing around and that it is landing on his sandwich. I will be adding a sound effect for the fly but the eyes will still play an important role in telling the story to the audience.

With all of this in mind, I have shot some reference video of myself acting out this scene so that I could get a better idea of how to animate the character:



There are some more reference videos of me that I may use parts of but I felt that this one worked the best. The main problem with this one is, again, the issue of fitting it into 20 seconds. Not including the part where I am moving away and towards the camera, it lasts for about 25 seconds so I will need to cut it down a bit in places. The easiest part to shorten will be the character following the fly on to his sandwich, it probably doesn't need to be quite as long.

Also the facial expressions could do with being a lot more clear in the angry parts of the scene. This will be a lot easier to achieve with a 3D character because I can exaggerate the expressions a lot more with a puppet than I can myself in real life (I am not a mime artist after all).

Mime Ideas

My initial mime idea is as follows. There will be a character that is trying to eat his lunch but every time he goes to bite something, a bird swoops down and steals it. After this happens for the 2nd time, he enters an invisible box and when the bird swoops in this time, we hear a thud and the character laughs.

From discussing this idea with various people I have realised that, although the idea may work, there is not enough time to do the animation for it as the piece has to be around 20 seconds and this would probably end up being around a minute. Therefore I have been playing around with another idea which should fit in to the 20 seconds.

The second idea involves a character sitting down eating his sandwich. Every time he goes to bite his sandwich, a fly lands on it. He gets rid of it but the third time the fly lands, he gives up and eats the fly and the sandwich together. This has the three main things that a scene needs which are as follows:

An Objective : His goal is to eat his sandwich. An Obstacle : The obstacle is the fly landing on his sandwich, this leads to conflict between him and the fly. A Resolution : He ends up eating the fly with his sandwich, this solves both problems because now there is no more fly and he gets to eat his sandwich.

I have done a rough storyboard for this idea to see how it might look (click on the images to see the full boards) :

After planning the scene out this way, I was a little worried about the amount of time that it would take to fit all of these actions in. Therefore I have put these images along with sound effects in to an animatic. The animatic is shown below:



As you can see, the clip is 19 seconds long so it does fit in to the time. The next stage will be to make sure that I get reference footage for all of the movements in the mime piece. I will record myself doing the entire piece so that I can get a feel for how much thinking time the character need for each action. Some bits may need to be shorter than the animatic, some bits may need to be longer.

I will also take a look at how a mime would move whilst performing these kind of actions. I will post all of this reference material in my next entry.