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).