Animated Narratives week 9

Week 9: Movement

The theme of this week's class is "movement". As the saying goes, hearing is believing and seeing is believing. A person's words often do not show the real thoughts, but some small unconscious actions can show the character's personality. Therefore, the description of action is a very important part of the story. This week, I will focus on the character's actions, hoping to enrich the character's personality through action descriptions.

According to the plan I have made, I tried to add the following action description in the storyboard: "After listening to Guderian's words, Jack did not seem too surprised, but returned to his armchair to sit down, the tips of the fingers of both hands together, closed his eyes in meditation." But when I finished writing the review, I found that a simple description of action did not fully achieve the purpose of enriching the character. So I thought I needed to do more research and enlightenment.

First I analyzed the most successful silent film in American history, Modern Times. Modern Times, the pinnacle of Chaplin's silent film era, stars Chaplin with his "comical and exaggerated body language is far better than dialogue" attitude, portraying to the audience a not-so-great little man who always makes a mess of his work but wants to do every job well in the context of the American economic depression. He has his little selfishness and greed, his cowardice and compromise. But he was able to make many people understand what he was going through, to make many people feel sad for his misfortune, in the hearts of others are surging on such a faint trace of sadness, but he used a variety of means to make you can not help but smile slightly. I think Chaplin's success lies in the fact that there is no deliberate performance in a given setting, and with the simple background sound it is easy to bring the audience into that atmosphere. Based on this finding, I recall this description from John Dickson Carr's "The Three Coffins": "Grimaud was rational in his dealings and had a playful gleam in his eye at times. He spoke quickly, with a raspy voice that seemed to come from the depths of his throat; he also had a habit of gnashing his teeth and chuckling softly at the same time." In just a few short words, Grimaud's characteristics are described in such a way that it is hard for the reader to forget such a character.

After this week's study, I realized that although action is an important element of characterization, it does not stand alone. In order to express the character's personality, first of all, the action needs to be reasonable and appropriate without being deliberate. Secondly, you need to add auxiliary elements to set off or enhance the action (such as sound, environment, light, etc.). In the future, we will pay more attention to the use of these two aspects in the action when describing other action parts of the storyboard.