"Denial" Acting Test for Class 4 - Advanced Acting

Here's the animation I've spent the last 8 weeks on, but is still only about 60% done, I would say. It's roughly 15 seconds long and is yet another serious piece. I'm drawn to these emotional exchanges, and though I love comedy, I haven't found the right audio clip or idea to go down that road yet. Plus one of my long term goals is to push the medium into deeper dramatic territory...but I digress.

No matter what style of shot that I do, it's most important that I do it well. And I'm still learning my strengths and weaknesses.

As you can see, we were finally allowed to do camera cuts and also introduce a second character. I was more than a little bit nervous, knowing how much work just one full character is, but I felt very invigorated with the chance to tell my story with the camera as well as the movement of the characters. That's realy fun for me, exploring how to tell the same story and even further the story through all the filmic elements.

Anyhow, I went about everything backwards. I didn't do reference til the end (BIG mistake) after I had gone down many acting choice deadend streets and suffered bad pose on top of bad pose. I was really fumbling around, not committing to anything 100%, because I didn't feel it was worth committing to yet... nothing was feeling appropriate.

But I had to show progress. Every week. And it was so frustrating to work on things and feel like I was only going backwards. Not to mention how my chronic procrastination was sending my stress levels and blood pressure to new heights.

Not that this piece is "final" by any stretch of the imagination. I will continue to work on it, but it's interesting to me to see my original thumbnails and how it has evolved. How I have stuck with the general ideas and emotions of my thumbs for the most part, but I've tried to "plus" them along the way. I wish my ideas were a little clearer, a little stronger in that planning stage, but that could have happened had I acted out the stuff and filmed video reference back then instead of waiting til the end. Oh well. Live and learn.

Enough of that though. No more caveats, no more disclaimers. I share this to give you an idea of my learning process though, not to make excuses for myself.