This past December, I finished Class 4, Intro to Acting (or as my mentor would prefer, “Intro to Character”) and am already 4 weeks into Class 5, Advanced Acting. Acting is a new beast to me. Needless to say, I am learning TONS.

For Class 4, I had Steve Cunningham, Dreamworks animator extraordinaire, as my mentor. He taught me so much about developing a character for my acting shots, and how “action reveals character” (his favorite motto). The class was eye opening and changed the way I approach my shots. For our 1st assignment in that class, we had to do a pantomime shot. For the 2nd assignment we had to choose a 10 second (max.) single person dialogue and animate to it. We only had to animate the body; we do the facial animation in Class 5.

Bonus points if you can guess where it’s from:

My Class 5 mentor is Wayne Gilbert, of “Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation” fame. I highly recommend the book if you want good pointers for thumbnailing. He’s been a great mentor so far, extremely helpful in helping me with my facial animation for my Class 4 dialogue shot:

I’m not too keen of my work (particularly the pantomime) from Class 4. I feel like these were my “growing pains” as I tried to understand the concepts Steve taught us. It started coming together during the dialogue shot and during the first quarter of Class 5 as I wrap the shot up, but I still have ways to go when it comes to grasping character motivation. Reading “A Practical Handbook for The Actor” helped open my mind a bit on how to approach my shots. There’s definitely a long road ahead for me, but that’s what excites me most: the fact there’s still more to learn and more to improve upon.

We start our last AM assignment, a 2 person dialogue shot, this week. After that, we move onto our final class, Polishing and Portfolio. I can’t believe there’s only 5 more months to go!