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Secondary action

Posted on April 10, 2021  Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Education

When working on the bar sequence aka “GG Bar ANIM 01” on Bastien Dubois’ “Souvenir souvenir” shortfilm, Bastien gave me a rough outline of what he wanted to see in the sequence and a great audio to interpret and cut.

Having two characters sat at a table and exchanging lines is the most boring kind of performance you can create so I always try to make the action more specific and find some additional business, some secondary action the characters can do, just so they belong to that situation and to that shot specifically, and not to any other part of that story, or to any other storyline.

I remember several great clips from Billy Wilder’s “The apartment” we were shown in the acting class at Animation Mentor and those are great examples I always keep in mind when thinking about “secondary action”.

This shot eventually got cut in the cutting room so I can only show you the 3d animation pass and few screenshots from the final treatment. I hope you won’t get distracted by the rig glitches.

For that sequence, Bastien only gave me an outline of what he wanted to see, an audio, a camera and 2 character rigs. With a careful editing, a touch of basic modeling and rigging, it was up to me to sell him the sequence and Bastien really like what I gave him until he had to make dramatic cuts few month later, to reduce the length of the short film.

As you might have guessed from my previous posts, a big chunk of the short film was actually animated in 3d and like a surgeon, Bastien carefully removed some frames, then added a magical compositing and 2d animation/texture pass to make the 3d animation look more 2d so there was no need for a high polish of the action in 3d. We were more interested in the pacing of the cuts, the composition, the energy of the shot, which a lot came from the secondary action, aka, the business the characters were doing.

I hope you will find this interesting and keep an eye on the Annie Awards next week as we are competing in the short film category!

Related posts:

Souvenir souvenir…
“Souvenir souvenir”. psy_yy25

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