Creating a Live Action Video for Refference

One thing I noticed in many of the talks I went to at the Manchester Animation Festival is that a common trend the animators would show us would be Live Action Videos for reference. For example, when someone came out to talk about the making of The Shaun the Sheep Movie, they would show us footage of animators acting out certain scenes to help them with understanding the emotions, facial expressions and physicality of the characters.

This process seems incredibly important to the process and incredibly important to make the best animation possible and I got the feeling from the talks that animators use it for literally every shot depicting a character, even shots that last no longer than a second. So the idea of Matt and I creating a LAV for our own animation seemed like a great idea.

Of course Matt and I have weaknesses when it comes to working in a pair, but we also have similar strengths that are only better enhanced through being in a team. One of these strengths is acting. We rarely admit it but I think we both love acting and whenever there is the chance to perform we go for it, whatever it is.

With this animation I felt like it was very important to act it out because it is incredible character based so I thought if we captured the emotions we want to give each character ourselves then when it came to animating, our jobs are far easier because we simply have to look at the reference footage.

Although some of the footage might look like we're being silly and just having fun, we did take it very seriously as we felt the better we could act out the emotions and physicality of our characters the better we could animate them. Here is what inspired me when it came to performing these characters...

Okay, I'm not exactly Jack Nicholson in terms of acting ability but you get the idea...