Blogs worth checking out

Mark Kennedy - storyboard artist:


(image taken from his blog)

http://sevencamels.blogspot.co.uk/

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Toby Shelton - Story Artist at Dreamworks Animation:



http://tobyshelton.blogspot.co.uk/

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Rad Sechrist - storyboard artist at Dreamworks Animation:


(image taken from his blog)
http://radfordsechrist.blogspot.co.uk/

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Also found this article from Mark Kennedy's blog really useful:

http://sevencamels.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/true-comedy-comes-from-character.html

The article is about creating comedy in scenes, but using the characters to achieve it, not just funny gags and slapstick.

A memorable quote:

"The biggest laughs always come from watching characters react, think and take action."- Mark Kennedy

I think this post is very useful to us, not only for this project, but for the final project and all upcoming projects that involves comedy in any shaper or form. Both Siobhan and Matthew talked about this in the lectures as well, but again I need to quote Mark from his blog-post:

"The parts that I really laugh at are the moments where the characters are thinking, processing information and formulating ideas".

That's also what I discovered where the issue with my mime, there weren't enough time in the sound-clip to give the character the time needed to process his thoughts and THEN take action. So by editing the sound and adding more time I found that my animation seemed funnier than before. I did not add any action, I just made it possible for the character to think about the action before doing it.

I also need to mention that in this blog-post he actually describes the scene I used for my presentation from Tangled. (He did the storyboards). So fun to see the actual storyboard templates from the scene, and these simple drawings are full of personality and information:



As Mark writes in the blog-post, he really felt he knew Maximus, and he did not see him as a cartoon-character, but as a living, breathing character. This made it possible to create humour in the scene, since he knew Maximus would be too proud and stubborn to shake Flynn's hand in the beginning of the scene. Rapunzel is able to convince him because Maximus probably didn't have too much experience with women or "gentle manipulation".

- This really made me realize how important it is to really know your character before starting to animate. Planning sure is a big part of the final result. I am taking several mental notes, and will do my best to try and make it an even bigger part of my workflow in the future.