What connects ZZTop, Jesus and Me? Read on to find out!

Here we are again, another week, and another blogg. Right, where to begin? The lip sync project is as good a place to start as any because it is more or less finished, I have even remembered to bring a copy of it home so that I have posted for you but the sounf dosn't sem to want to work, apologies. For the mean time I can sound pretentious and talk about acting theory! Ed Hooks’ book Acting for Animators talks bout a lot of different acting methods but two that stuck in my mind were, one: feel the emotions of the character and two: what was the character doing before the scene started (or something like that). At first I found it quite hard to do any of this but after a day a very frustrating animation tests where nothing seemed to be working I was feeling pretty miserable and I think that this helped when I came back to animating the next day.

From a more technical perspective it was quite hard to do more subtle animation and as a result I don’t think that I did enough animation in the tests and it all looked a bit lifeless and mechanical. Eventually I started to use a bit of exaggeration and this looked a lot better. I would like to think that I have got the balance between exaggeration and subtlety about right, there are a few bits that could be tweaked; the blinks are a bit fast and I think the pull at the end could do with some more tweaning. There is also a rather annoying band of light across the puppets face so if I have time over the next week I will try to re-shoot it.

My attention this week has also been focused on getting on with the storyboards, which are now all roughed out and just need tarting up. The song I have chosen to interpret is ZZTop’s Jesus Just Left Chicago, a proper blues song, not the crappy pop stuff that they did in the 80’s. Anyway, I have turned this into a charming story bout a drugged-up, womanizing rock star, a sort of Jesus of the present day, if he where famous, definitely not for anyone who is religious though. Here I have for you some character sketches of Mr. Jesus, this is pretty much how he appears on the story boards, I am still not too sure on a finished style, I quite like this biro look but I have also done a test with watercolors, that’s on A3 so if I remember to scan it in the studio you can see it.

Until then I shall bid you farewell.