"...Payback!" Acting/Dialogue Animation Test (Jeff Kim)

[Booyah]

Great composition, posing, and acting. Well done all around.

[agreenster]

Yay! Glad to see it all rendered and done! Nice job Jeff

[coop]

really solid work kim-motion!

a couple of tweaks i'd suggest (all on the nitpicky side)

on "this man" you may want some quick glances over at the guy. he stays locked onto the person he's speaking to, but it might be nice to have him indicate he's aware of the guy he's talking about. just some eye darts

on 'our enemy' - i think you either need to really pose the heck out of the pointing hand on the in betweens to support the broad snappy gesture, or maybe tone the whole pointy thing back a hair -

i love the walk back, but wondering if he should relax his arms a bit more instead of keeping them behind him the whole time -

that's it. really strong work!

-coop

[Andrew Howe]

Loving it!

Great choice of voiceover. And well animated too!

Congrats.

[leishman]

COOL....i like this.

[Banshax]

Hey Jeff,

First off, awesome job. Nothing big I can comment on so please consider the following as light suggestions. Since its all polished and done, and finished etc, please keep these comments as suggestions for next time :]


The link in "this man" and the guy sitting in the back could be stronger. Either with staging or posing. I get the idea of building the performance from a low quiet pose to a high all out pose in the end. Its just that you need to make that connection pretty strong and quick for the pay-off to work.


I`d be nice to have the speaker look down (inward) and revolted when he sais "sold us".
Hes trying to sell that this man is the lowest of the low. The looking up is more fitting when trying to sell something as great.
I get that hes talking to the judge but since we`ve never seen the judge it feels "off" to have his eyeline look up. (once again staging?)

I`d put the camera cut 4 or so frames before the pointing hand touches the lower frame. Cut in the motion instead of the end.

If these where to actors I think the guy sitting there would feel quite out-acted because the other man steals all his screentime. :]

Ah lots of talking sorry bout that. Excellent work dude, once again read the above and take what you feel is right from it, ignore what`s redundant or against your planning in the first place.
I`ll go back and work on my pendulum now hehe, take care.

[RhythmOfLine]

wow jeff...this is great work! you've come a long way man. other than that, i'd take into consideration what banshax said as finishing touches to a job really well done :)


keep up the good work!:thumbsup:

[liquidik]

Hey Jeff you see, those Italian lessons at the party really pushed your animation ;)

eheh...really nice work!

Gian

[BigMouth]

very funny. Great job!

[GoldenCamel]

harsh crit ahead, turn on headlights, not for the faint of heart.

nice job overall. a frame counter would have helped to get some crits thou. Lip sync in general has some problems. first two shots, good composition, third shot, weak composition, third shot is the peak of your scene so you should have used a more dynamic camera angel.
in first shot, i think you're abusing the "finger pointing" pose for every beat four times in a row, usualy you want to build some contrast in poses and using the same pose is weakening the performance, i would have saved it for "our enemy" and used differetn poses for the first two.

right hand on the table, fingers are very unusualy posed even thou it's a readable silhouette.

third shot, guy shouting "our enemy", pose is very weak, it has all the "principles" forced into it but it doesn't seem natural.

some problems with arcs overall, not clean in some parts.

the pose on "payback", weak, this is the height of your scene, you want a pose that has a really strong line of action. left arm is not contributing anything to the pose but making it harder to read.

i dont know if this rig allows for bends in arms but using a little bend would help selling the force in fast sweeping moves.

good luck

[Digiegg]

Just dropping by to say Hi Mr. Kim
=)
Hope all is well.

[Kimotion]

Thanks folks!

I love the critiques so far. That third shot does have parts that are just nagging away in my head. This was a personal piece where I challenged myself to do it in one month, sort of like a personal 10-second club kinda thing (March 28 - April 29).

What I've learned is that one can never plan "too much" and there are acting ideas where if I changed them early enough, it may have turned out to have more "punch" at the end.

[keithlango]

The harder crit from before has a lot of valid points, but I'm gonna back out and address the overall effect and intention of the piece.

It's obvious there's a lot of work here and many of the details seem to have been diligently dealt with. Yet the overall performance leaves me feeling underwhelmed. It's kinda stuck in that shadow land between wanting to be cartoony and live actiony- much like a lot of what is getting made these days, so you're not alone in this struggle. As such the moment portrayed here never quite feels like it lives comfortably in either place. It's not cartoony enough to work as a cartoony bit of animation- it's not inherently funny in its approach. You could make this into a funny clip if you think about it. However it's too over the top and "animatey" (for lack of a better word) to feel natural enough to be compelling on a more live-action sort of way- you could make this a powerful and imposing piece of fim as well- the kind that really pushes a viewer into a place where they have to deal with the uncomfortable aspect of bloodthirsty cruelty fueled by unreasoning revenge (I'm thinking of the sequence in "Saving Private Ryan" when the squad is arguing over killing their one prisoner from the machine gun nest.). But that's a very different kind of acting which isn't present here- even though it seems like you're trying to sniff around the edges of it. As a result I never really buy this character. He doesn't make me laugh and he doesn't make me feel any other emotion. He feels like he is an invention that exists to move around, not a living person who is expressing a real set of thoughts and emotions in a real moment.

Admittedly this is a very difficult thing to pull off at the student level. Shoot, most professionals aren't hitting this level of work, either. I struggle with it as well. I guess the only reason I chime in is as a way of encouraging you and others to not settle for less.

Keep up the fine effort.

-k

[zsjasper]

awesome! the facial and animation are all perfect 5 stars from me :thumbsup:

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