Advanced Acting

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Class 5 at Animation Mentor with Ryan Vicik! Ryan is an incredible animator who’s worked on some amazing films in recent years like Croods 2, Boss Baby 2, and The Bad Guys, so I was really looking forward to learning from him.

This class focused on animating a two-person dialogue scene. I started by picking three potential audio clips, but ultimately chose the one I felt had the most potential for full-body acting. The line comes from one of my favorite movies, Lost in America, starring Albert Brooks. In the scene, his character is trying to convince his wife to quit his job—right after being fired from his own—which makes for some great subtext to play with.

At first, I storyboarded a version of the scene with a lot of physical action and exaggerated poses, but I decided to simplify things so I wouldn’t get bogged down building overly complex constraint systems. Of course, I still ended up having to set up a pretty intricate system with Aia and the chair!

The grind of working on just a few shots over several months was definitely real, but thanks to Ryan’s mentorship, I came away with valuable techniques and insights that I’m excited to apply to future projects.

 

Blocking Pass Plus – This is where I put down the main storytelling poses, keys, extremes, and breakdowns. I also added some little secondary actions with Aia to really push her attitude and hint at what’s going on in her head.

 

Spline Pass – I definitely “noodled” too much on the male character in this pass. My mentor called me out on it, so I had to roll things back to an earlier version and stick closer to the reference. Along the way, the shot had lost some of the snappiness he liked, so I focused on cleaning it up and cutting out a lot of the floatiness.

 

Polish Pass – I spent a lot of time here dialing in the accents, mouth shapes, eye shapes, and adding some nice offsets to the body. This pass was definitely more work than my earlier assignments—I even dug through a bunch of “Art of” books just to study what appealing mouth and eye shapes should look like.

 

Final Polish – I kept refining the mouth and eye shapes, added more offsets for extra appeal, and polished up Aia’s hair animation to bring everything together.

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.