Intro to Acting - Dialogue

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Oh right, here we go—my first dialogue animation in a while! I came across three audio tracks that I really liked, each offering its own unique acting challenges and varying levels of difficulty. In the end, I chose a clip from the 1963 film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I fell in love with the movie after discovering it for free on YouTube—I had no idea there were so many classic films available there! Beyond the hilarious physical comedy and brilliant cinematography, the film is packed with fun, well-delivered dialogue that made it a perfect fit for this project.

 

Blocking Part I - I had a lot of fun posing the characters and dialing in the facial expressions. I even added a first pass at the dialogue animation.

 

Blocking Part II - I decided to reposition the scratching hand to improve the readability of the silhouette, and I also simplified the eye mask animation for clarity.

 

Blocking Part III - In this pass, I focused on refining the mouth shapes and syncing them more closely with the audio track.

 

Blocking Part IV -I added some keep-alive movement to Jules, along with subtle breathing animation during his dialogue. I also gave Viktor a bit of motion so he wouldn’t look completely lifeless.

 

Polish Final - In my final pass, I scaled back some of Viktor’s animation since it wasn’t adding much to the shot and felt a bit distracting. I kept subtle keep-alive elements—like his eye movement and breathing—to make sure he didn’t appear completely lifeless. I also fine-tuned some of Jules’ mouth shapes, especially on the B and L sounds.

Intro to Acting - Pantomime

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As an animator, I’ve always known that great animation isn’t just about movement—it’s about performance. This course, Intro to Acting, is all about digging deeper into the “why” behind each gesture, expression, and pose, and learning how to bring characters to life with intention and emotion. I’m ready to stretch beyond the mechanics and really start thinking like an actor.

For the first exercise, we were asked to pantomime am animation for a character who goes from emotion to another within 192 frames. Since it was March and I’m a big college basketball fan, I wanted my animation to have a March Madness theme.

 

Blocking - Felt really good about the blocking pass. Work hard trying to nail the motion of the secondary action with this hands. Blocked in the basic emotions. Need to address the feet being to static and in place.

 

Splining - Feet still felt a little sticky here and the arms still needed a bit more drag and overlap. The head need some tweaking in terms of where he is looking when he turns to the left of the composition. The overall body still feels a bit ‘drifty’ too so I needed to retime some stuff.

 

Polishing - Overall, It’s feeling a little better. The head, neck, and chest needs a little more overlap in the beginning as he is getting up. The face poses as he changes expressions needed more polish as he turns and at the very end. The arms at the end as they dangles still feel a bit floaty. Need to play with the sharpness.

 

Polish Plus - At this point everything is feeling good. The one thing that I definitely will need to fix is the left foot sliding around frame 100. I would also like to polish the face more — particularly the eye mask and getting the right eye shapes.