Thursday 26 January 2012

Artefact 1 - "You talkin' ta me?"

First of five character animations being created for my Research Doucment in my final year of Univesity at Nottingham Trent studying multimedia. Using the famous "ya talkin' to me?" speech given by Robert DeNiro from the 1976 classic Taxi Driver I re worked that scene in animation as the original speech was physically very stiff so I loosened it up a bit in this animation.

 

 In this piece I wanted to make the performance from the original film a little more animation (no pun intended) but at the same time subtle. Still focusing on the upper half of the body I wanted more dynamic movement in not only the arms but in the eyes. In the original, even thought DeNiro's performance in classic he is very still apart from a shaking in his shoulders and head. In hindsight this as a first animation artefacts was quite too ambitious and although I'm pleased with it, not overly I might add, I don't think it quite captures the intense performance as the original. I still believe I have created an performance of a character that has real intent in both his mannerisms and in his psyche. He portrays that of a man that is confident and strong minded believing that he better than the person/audience that he is speaking to, this is noticeable by the breaks in eye contact. The animation overall is ok but it lacks strong key poses. Its needs more weight. Someone that stands still in one places doesn't not move, they sway side to side displacing their weight from one leg to another every now and then. Even though I have keyed in breathing it isn't noticeable enough to the audience and in lack of movement the characters starts to 'die'. It needs more emphasis on words that are spoken, strong words are normally backed up with strong poses and movements. This goes on throughout the animation, over all it is all too smooth, moving from one pose to another, movements sometimes need to be more strong and sharp. I will need to start animation from the torso outwards to the rest of the limbs more efficiently as I did start by animating the waist or hips but sometimes got inpatient and moved onto trying to animate too much too quickly I will need to make sure I have a good base of animation in my coming artefacts.