Sunday, 7 January 2007
Why animators shouldn't study animation....
No drawings this post. Just wanted to share my thoughts on a film called (pause for effect)…..”Big” It came on TV over the Christmas holidays, channel 5 me thinks. It’s amazing to watch something in your child hood, come back years later, watch it in adulthood and look at it in the same way and yet in a completely different way. I’m studying animation, so over the last couple months I’ve tried to look at things closely, understand movement, mannerisms etc. Watching that film gave me an appreciation for why Tom Hanks is such a good actor. You can see he really studied the mannerisms of children to pull off a very believable performance. I’m not talking about the obvious things like, playing with toys or chewing with your mouth open. Little things like, lying down on his stomach watching TV and his legs are up in the air swinging behind him. The part where he's in the toy store talking to his boss continuously swinging and playing with his bag. Even when he cried it was like a child, constantly fiddling with his fingers. The greatest animators of our time repeatedly say don’t try to do animation by studying only animation because you’ll only learn mechanically techniques. I thought I understood that, but for some reason watching that film really brought home what they mean. I’ve had a lot of epiphanies lately, and I hope they keep coming.
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2 comments:
yep dope film. one of my all time favs. your so right about not looking at other animation to learn how to animate, i mean it is good to c how other people do things. but it is far more important to take inspiration for life, it's what brad bird always says (and that dude knows what he's talking about). what your talking about with tom hanks is funny because i had a similar moment when i first started to think about character animation. i was watching "liar, liar" and thought jim carrey was just sick he knows how to act out the weirdest thing. he could be the most dope character animator.
c ya 2morrow
Actually Tim, all those coversations we had about "things being lost in translation" sparked those ideas. The Brad Bird/ Andrew Stanton/ Ed Catmull lecture off the character design blog put things into perspective.
Wes
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