Improvimation

I wanted to talk a bit about what we are doing at the Academy this semester. This semester, Scott Clark and I recorded 4 improv actors doing random scenes. We then picked the best one out of 20 or so skits and are animating to it. The students are in charge of every aspect of the process. We started by doing visual development. Then tasks were assigned to each student. Some Model, Some are doing layout etc… We have cast out the scenes and the students are beginning animation. Each of them will have a chunk of very juicy shots to animate. The dialogue they are animating to is full of great stuff. It give them the opportunity to animate something original with interesting characters. Granted, the story is improvised, so it aint Bambi but its good and alot can be learned. Scott Clark coined the term “Improvimation” I think its a great way to generate content, especially on the student level. Alot of the time, students take dialogue clips from movies. Unless they are done really well, most of them are lack luster. Expect to see the final film at the end of the semester.

The image is of one of our characters “The Captain” It is a skit involving three characters.

-Andrew

Spring 06 Work – Level One

Since everyone else is doing it I guess Level one will show some of our work too. Level one starts out with the bouncing ball, walk, jump, some other stuff and then at the end we start doing some acting assignments with no dialog. Well enjoy hopefully this will get more of our students wanting to share their work.

Dr. Stephen G

Chris Turner
Carlos Jay
Joon Yang
Venece Lyman

Spring 06 Work – Level 3

Hello, Scott here to share what my class did last semester as well. I teach the Animation 3 (Pixar 3) class at the Academy of Art University. Usually I co-teach with Angus MacLane but he’s taken time off from teaching. This time around I had the very talented and experienced Adam Burke along to help me out.

Because each semester is only 15 weeks long it has been very hard to get a filmmaking class going. Students simply need more time (like a full year) to truly develop a film/thesis project. Because of this time limitation, I decided to try something different and put together a “scene workshop”. The idea was to give students a chance to work on a scene from a movie; to simulate the actual work environment of a feature animaiton studio. The hope was to force students to collaborate on the scene in finding the proper acting across the arc of the scene. I intentionally picked a scene that had clear characters, some fun dialogue, and a buildup to a climax and resolution so that it would be fun to watch out of context of the movie. The students were not told what movie the dialogue was from and were discouraged from seeking it out. Each student was given 2-3 shots and was responsible for all characters in the shot. Adam Burke and I acted as the “directors”; inspired by the students’ best ideas, we steered them in a coherent directrion.

This scene represents 10 weeks of work. It was not nessesarily important to us that all the animation get finished/polished, but that the ideas and acting ideas make sense and be fun as the scene played through. It is my opinion that all too often, animation students worry too much about the details, movement, and polish in their animation without really thinking about the content. With this assignment I wanted students to think like actors and filmmakers. I was very pleased with the outcome and will continue to experiment with this idea for future classes.

For this first experimental class a scene from the movie “The Imposters” with Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt was chosen:

Download File Here

Spring 06 Work – Level 2

As usual, this semester we had a great class. All three levels did some great work. In our level two class we focus not only on the assignment, but the character. We really want the characters to be very different from each other. This gets the students to think more about the acting and the situation, than some canned animation assignment. Using the Norman model, our students made everything from Old ladies to little kids. Great Work! Look for updates with more work from level two and the class project Level 3 did. They turned out a 3 minute sequence! You may need to download a media player for linux to view certain movies…. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

-Andrew

KC Roeyer

Chiwook Han

Tun Veerapatra

AtSushi Kojima

Aaron Koressel

David Fong

Rini Sugianto

Al Cimino

The Gear Change

Well, Its getting to the end of the semester and our students are doing really great work. One of our assignments is a gear change. A Gear Change is having a character change from one emotion to another. We ask our students to use the Norman model which was created by Morgan Loomis and Leif Jeffers for our classes. We want the students to really explore the character they are creating. The who, what and where are just as important to us as the assignment. By really getting into the character, the students can create a character with depth as opposed to using the generic model. It also lets them practice design. Here are a few examples of the gear change exercise. I’m going to start posting more student work in the next few weeks so stay tuned for some really great stuff. Our 3rd level class is doing a great series of shots that Dr Clark will get up when its finished.

Han Cho – Car Wash
Veerapartra Tun – Cheating
KC Roeyer – Electrical Worker